Re: Absurd password (rant)

Peter Moylan <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Apparently the taxation service of every country is a little insane.
Last year I received a letter from the Australian taxation office
saying that I owed them nothing. Several months later I got a
threatening letter concerning an overdue payment. After many hours
on the phone, being shuttled backwards and forwards, I was finally
told that the original letter was a mistake on their part, and that
I actually owed them $700 (or some similar amount). Furthermore, I
would have to pay a late fee because my payment was overdue.

I protested bitterly over the late fee, saying that my payment could
not be considered overdue if nobody had ever told me that it was
due.

That wouldn't work in the US. Here, they don't tell you what you owe.
It's your responsibility to tell them what you owe, to justify this
number (correctly) on the form you send them, and to send in the
correct amount (regardless of whether it's the one you state) before
the deadline.

My (now) wife once got a bill for $0.00 from the phone company for a
number that she had closed. Followed by a notice that if she didn't
pay $0.00, her phone service would be cut off. She called, and was
told that the easiest way to resolve it was to write them a check for
$0.01. They would deposit it, she'd get a check for $0.01 back, and
they could close the matter. I have no idea how much that cost the
company to resolve.

A couple of months ago, I got a check from Mellon Bank for $0.03,
accompanied by a two-page letter explaining that they had recently
audited their software and found a bug in the way it rounded. It
wasn't a systemmatic error, so it mostly cancelled out, but a lot of
accounts were a few cents off. The note included a FAQ list with
things like "Why are you bothering to send me such a trivial amount?"
(We're legally required to.) "It will cost me more to deposit it than
the check is worth" (You're under no obligation to deposit it; we're
obligated to send it to you.) I suspect that the amounts of the
checks totalled small numbers of thousands, but the cost of processing
the whole thing may well have been millions.

--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |Your claim might have more
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |credibility if you hadn't mispelled
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |"inteligent"

kirshenbaum@xxxxxxxxxx
(650)857-7572

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/


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