If you can believe it, the California state government is even worse than the Florida one. I filed my California income tax on time and correctly, but a few weeks ago I got a letter requiring I send a ton of documents “to prevent identity theft.” Even though this was not an audit (it said so right in the docs), there were threats that if I did not send the docs, California would not process my tax return and I could pay additional taxes. There were other vague threats too.

So I sent the requested documents in by the 30 day deadline, waited a bit, then called the California Franchise Tax Board. The woman who answered was nice enough but said she couldn’t help me, as there was often an eight-week wait for any document processing to be done and she could not verify if the FTB had even received anything. She said I’d just have to wait.

Now, I’m just anticipating the moment the gloved fist of state government hits me with more fees and penalties for their self-imposed delay or perhaps (befitting the message) their own failure in processing my taxes. I fully expect this to occur, even though I did everything perfectly correctly. Because I have an extremely common name is why I expect this happened. Related to that, there is one large gas station chain where I can’t use any of my cards at the pumps for the same reason (I’m guessing someone with my same name stole gas or did some fraud a few times, so they banned anyone with my name altogether).

The more shit like this the California government pulls, the more it pushes you to libertarianism.