California Tax Board Rant

Next up in the rant department is the California Franchise Tax Board which is in charge of collecting California's income tax.  Bottom line, if you have a problem with your California taxes call the taxpayer rights advocate number.  Apparently it exists because the regular process is often an ordeal.

While I live in New Jersey my employer has a location in California where I have worked several summers most recently in 2019.  This requires me to file a non-resident income tax form with California and pay the appropriate tax on my California wages.  I use TurboTax to do my income taxes.  However TurboTax only includes one state income tax return.  Additional states can be purchased but being cheap when doing my 2019 taxes I filled out the California non-residence forms myself.  Unfortunately I made a small error.

My California return included form 540NR and schedule CA.  540NR is the main form, the purpose of schedule CA is to reduce your allowed deduction based on the ratio of your California income to your total income.  After completing schedule CA you were suppose to copy two numbers back to form 540NR, your California income and your California taxable income after your allowed deduction.  Unfortunately I only copied the second number back which is the only number used going forward (and the only number schedule CA tells you to transfer back).  As a result I left line 32 of form 540NR blank but everything else including the tax owed was correct.

A few months later California sent me a refund check for my entire tax paid in 2019 and a notice that they had changed my return.  Apparently some computer program had seen the blank line 32 and ignoring everything else in the return had deduced I had no California income and therefore owed no California tax.  This was remarkably foolish as any human reviewing the return would have seen easily that it was line 32 that was wrong not everything else on the return.  And I think it would be a good idea for to have a human review computer changes rather than automatically send out a check for the entire tax paid.  I expect it is pretty rare for people to work in California, have substantial taxes withheld from their wages, submit a return with an additional payment but nevertheless actually owe no California taxes.

I didn't cash the refund check because I knew it was sent in error and starting calling the California tax help number.  This involved long periods (a hour or more) on hold.  California supposedly had a call back system but unlike Amtrak's it didn't work properly, my phone would ring once and then go to voice mail.  Eventually I got through to someone but they were not very helpful.  For some reason although what had happened should have been obvious they required I submit a written explanation.  I did this but made another error in that I didn't include an entire corrected return.

After hearing nothing for months I called again and when I eventually reached a representative they disclaimed all knowledge of my letter of explanation, apparently because I hadn't precisely followed their amended return process it had just been thrown away.  So I sent another written explanation this time including a formal amended return.       

After another long delay California sent me a letter changing my tax owed back to the amount I had originally calculated adding interest and fees and demanding payment.  After trying and failing to reach someone at the regular help number I eventually tried the taxpayer rights advocate number.   This quickly reached a representative who put a hold on my account and told me that I could resolve the situation by returning the refund check (which fortunately I still had).  I did this.

After a long vacation I tried calling back the person I had talked to.  This took several attempts (apparently they don't check their voice mail) but eventually I got through.  California had received the returned check and this had in fact resolved the situation. I requested (and eventually received) a statement showing a zero balance. 

The whole experience was infuriating.  Liberals claim to be the good government party but they often show little interest in the (no doubt boring) job of making government work well.  Democrats claim that Republicans have kept the federal IRS underfunded and perhaps that is true.  But there is no such excuse for California, the Democrats have had complete control for a long time.  Nevertheless the California Franchise Tax Board appears to be totally incompetent.  Apparently good service just isn't a liberal priority.  This is shortsighted as it creates antigovernment feelings which reduces the popularity of the overall liberal agenda. 

Amtrak Refund Rant

 I haven't been posting much lately, maybe a few good rants will get me back in the mood.  First up is Amtrak.

As I have mentioned before, since I am afraid of flying I sometimes travel long distances by Amtrak.  So I had an Amtrak reservation from NYP to DEN (with a connection in CHI) leaving Friday, September 3, 2021 just before the Labor Day weekend.  I had purchased it online paying by credit card.  On Wednesday night the remnants of Hurricane Ida passed over New Jersey and New York bringing very heavy rain.  The resulting flooding caused my train to be cancelled.  Amtrak notified my of this by email Thursday night.  The email gave a phone number to reschedule and an email address to request a refund.  

Fortunately my plans were flexible and leaving a few days later was no big deal.  So I called to reschedule but got a message that it would be difficult to get through to a service representative until after the Labor Day weekend.  Still no problem, I could just book a new reservation online myself.  I did this leaving the following Thursday.  And I emailed a refund request and received an acknowledgement.

I duly took the later train and got to Denver okay.  But I don't hear anything more about my refund so eventually on Friday September 17, 2021 I called Amtrak customer service.  This involved a long wait for a call back (which to be sure is better than being kept on hold).  I eventually spoke to someone.  Despite the acknowledgement it appears that email refund requests are ignored (or at least not dealt with in any sort of timely fashion).  But the person I spoke to promised to process my refund request.  I was told it would take 7-10 days to appear.  And the refund for the NYP-CHI portion of my trip did appear on my credit card by the following Monday.  

However the refund for the CHI-DEN portion didn't show up even after 10 days.  I called Amtrak customer service several times to try to find out what was holding it up.  Each call involving lengthy waits for a call back and/or on hold.  However the representatives refused to investigate until two months had passed from the original call.  Purportedly to allow for credit card billing cycles although I could see online that I had not gotten a credit. So it wasn't until Friday, November 19 that someone was finally willing to trace the refund request.  At which point it developed that the reason I never gotten the credit is that it had never been requested.  Apparently the second part of the refund (for the connecting CHI-DEN train) required some supervisor's approval and it had been sitting in their email inbox for two months.  I was told it had now been approved and in fact it did appear on my credit card by the following Monday.

Obviously this is totally unacceptable customer service.  There is no reason that getting a refund for a cancelled train should be a lengthy and painful process.

2021 Portfolio Review

In 2021 my main brokerage account had a total return of 25.68% (23.55% capital gain, 2.13% income).  As usual I will compare to VOO, Vanguard's S&P 500 index ETF, which returned 28.60% (27.02% capital gain, 1.58% income).  So I lagged the market by 2.92%.  This is explained by my not being fully invested, a drag on performance in an up market.  

During the year IBM spun off KD.  I counted the value of the KD shares and the cash I received for a fractional share as part of the IBM capital return.  Other than that I made no buys or sells during the year making computations simple.  Since this is intended to be a before tax accounting I added back some foreign tax withheld to income.

At the start of 2021 my allocations were VOO 49.94%, other ETFs 10.34%, individual stocks 28.07% and cash 11.64%.  Cash returned .01% lagging VOO by 28.59% for 3.32% of overall underperformance.  My stocks returned 28.39% (24.92% capital gain, 3.47% income) lagging VOO by .21% for .05% of overall underperformance.  And my ETFs other than VOO returned 33.14% (29.56% capital gain, 3.58% income) outperforming VOO by 4.54% for .46% of overall outperformance.  This adds up to 2.91% of underperformance in good agreement with the actual 2.92%. 

2021 was a pretty good year for stocks.  My worst stock (not counting KD) in this account was INTL which still returned 6.16%.  And my other brokerage account was up 24.34%.

Last week I sold WBK (ADRs for an Australian bank).  It has done poorly and the ADR agreement was going to expire at the end of January.  So the sensible choice was to take my tax loss and not get stuck with the actual Australian shares which I expect could be problematic.  I also bought some DGX (Quest Diagnostics).  My medical insurer uses them for tests, they seem reasonably competent and I like to buy stock in companies that I have had positive (or at least neutral) customer experiences with.

Zero Bound

I have had a TreasuryDirect account for many years.  This is linked to a bank account and allows you to buy and hold government securities.  From time to time I have used it to buy Treasury bills (TBills) which are government bonds which mature in a year or less.  Bills are sold at a discount and redeemed at their face value when they come due.  You can arrange to have the bills rollover when they come due.  That is the redemption amount is used to buy a new bill (of the same term and amount) with the discount remitted to your linked bank account.  

I had been rolling over 13 and 26 week bills for some time but eventually stopped and moved the money back to my bank account after interest rates remained near zero for years after the financial crisis of 2008.  When interest rates recovered a bit (to around 2%) in 2019 I started buying and rolling over bills again, this time 4 and 8 week (which I don't think they used to offer).  But the COVID epidemic has again caused rates to fall to near zero.  And in the case of the 4-week bills not just near zero, actually zero.  The last few auctions have settled with a zero interest rate.  This is a little annoying although it does have the advantage that I don't have to deal with recording the tiny deposits from a near zero rate.  But it will be really annoying if the rates go negative which they theoretically could do.  I expect the government will try to avoid this but if they don't I will stop the rollovers.  Perhaps I should anyway, my bank isn't paying a lot of interest but it is more than zero.

2020 Taxes

 Although the deadline was extended to May 17 I managed to get my 2020 income taxes done on the usual schedule.  I submitted my federal return electronically late on April 13 and mailed my New Jersey return the next day.  I mailed the New Jersey return because I am too cheap and stubborn to pay the fee (about $20) to submit it electronically.  I used TurboTax Deluxe again as I have every year since 2010 (for tax year 2009).  I have complained about the program in prior years but I didn't have any big issues this year.  One minor problem was some directions which weren't correct for seniors (the tax laws are a little different when you pass age 65) but this wasn't too hard to figure out and I certainly have no desire to return to doing my returns by hand.

My federal refund didn't show up in my bank account until May 5 which seems a bit longer than normal.  For some reason it was for $5.95 more than computed on the return I submitted.  To date I have not received any explanation (perhaps they don't bother sending a letter for such a small amount).  It is possible I copied some number from a 1099 form incorrectly and this was automatically corrected but I don't really know.  This is bugging me a little but probably not enough to pursue the issue.  I haven't heard anything from New Jersey which has sometimes been quicker.  However it's probably not the right time to be expecting record speed.

2020 Portfolio Review

Last year my main brokerage account had a total return of 8.97% (6.75% capital gain, 2.22% income). As usual I will compare to VOO, Vanguard's S&P 500 ETF, which returned 17.98% (16.19% capital gain, 1.79% income).  So I lagged the market by 9.01% which is a substantial amount especially considering that almost half of my portfolio was invested in VOO.

The main reason for my underperformance was that the steady dividend paying stocks that I prefer were out of favor (at least in a relative sense) last year.  At the beginning of the year I had 29.45% of my portfolio in individual stocks and 11.49% in ETFs (other than VOO).  The individual stocks returned 2.49% (-.53% capital gain, 3.02% income) accounting for 4.56% of under performance and the ETFs returned -6.15% (-9.49% capital gain, 3.34% income) accounting for another 2.77% of underperformance.  

A secondary reason for my underperformance was that I was not fully invested.  I started the year with 12.23% in cash (the remaining 46.83% was in VOO). During the year I invested 1.75% of this cash.  The remaining 10.49% in cash only returned about .51% in interest accounting for 1.83% of underperformance.

On March 18 I bought Fortis (FTS) a Canadian utility and added to VPU, Vanguard's utility ETF.  This was good timing as the market bottom (with respect to VOO) was on March 23.  However I would have done better buying VOO which returned about 60% from March 18 as opposed to about 33% for FTS and about 19% for VPU.  Still because of the good timing this portion of my portfolio outperformed by .16%.  This all adds up to 9% of underperformance in reasonable agreement with the actual 9.01%.

Only 2 of my individual stocks (BLK and TGT) beat the market by more than 10%.  Another 4 (BBL, CAT, NSC and UNH) were within 10% of the market return.  The remaining 15 (ALL, BNS, CM, ED, CVS, XOM, INTC, IBM, JPM, MET, PEG, SOUHY, TD, WFC and WBK) trailed by more than 10%. And all of my ETFs (except VOO) trailed VOO over the whole year by more than 10%.

When I started doing these reviews I only had one brokerage account which was funded with the IBM stock I had acquired over many years through their employee stock purchase program and which my new employer required me to mostly sell. I also owned some stock received by gift or inheritance in certificate or book entry form. Starting in 2018 I moved some of this stock as well as some cash and my Value Line mutual fund into a second brokerage account. In 2020 this motley collection returned 13.07%.     

Try, Try Again

As I have mentioned a couple of times, in 2010 I bought a cheap Dell Inspiron laptop computer. It has held up pretty well with a lot of use. However a couple of years ago it developed an annoying issue. The automatic Windows 10 update process started to fail repeatedly with an obscure error message about data corruption. I tried various purported remedies that I found with internet searches but none of them fixed the problem. I had basically given up and was resigned to living with an increasingly obsolete operating system (like with my still older Dell Inspiron desktop running Windows Vista).  However to my surprise on or about December 30, 2020 the update succeeded so the machine is now running the newest (20H2) version of Windows 10.

Upgrading to a new version of Windows 10 apparently wipes out the update history so I am unsure exactly when the problem started or how many failed attempts there were (it seemed like dozens at least). This wikipedia article has a table showing the Windows 10 version history. Based on this my best guess is that my machine was previously running Version 1803 of Windows 10 which was released April 30, 2018. The next version 1809 was released November 13, 2018 but apparently didn't get installed on my machine. The end of support for 1803 was November 12, 2019 leading to nagging messages from the Windows's updater about moving to a supported version of the operating system. However as noted above repeated attempts to do so always failed with an obscure error message. Whatever the problem was persisted through versions 1809, 1903, 1909 and 2004 as they became available. But it seems to have gone away with version 20H2 which first became available October 20, 2020.  New versions aren't installed immediately on all machines (my other laptop is still on 2004) but apparently installation was attempted on December 30 and succeeded.

So far (with limited use) I haven't encountered any problems with 20H2 so hopefully there was no actual data corruption issue and Microsoft just had some bug in their update process that went away when 20H2 was released. This problem wasn't the biggest deal in the world as I could still use the machine (which was gradually becoming functionally obsolete anyway) but it is still a rather sobering example of how hard it can be for the average person to effectively deal with this sort of obscure computer issue.