Missouri ups the ante on unpaid taxes - Kansas City Business Journal:

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Effective Jan. 1, state law will requirw companies renewing business licenses to obtain a certificat confirming that they have notaxes due. the Department of Revenue has hired three contractors since 2004 to identify and collect unpaid andunderreportedx taxes. The contractors have identifiedalmost $80 million the department otherwise might have missed, spokesma David Griffith said. The statde also has enlisted the public’s support. A “Who is not link on the department’s home page lista companies whose sales tax licenses have been revoked for failure toremit taxes. As of Dec. 21, the site listed 607 businessedin Jackson, Clay and Platte counties.
Even with outsides help, the state’s handle on tax delinquencies appears tenuous. Jim who left as administrator of the Departmentgof Revenue’s taxation bureau in estimated that as much as $1 billion in delinquent taxes are outstanding, though about half of that probably is too old or difficul t to realistically try to collect. “The figure is extremely hard to quantifuyand prove,” said now a consultant with , a Montreal-based technologyg consulting firm. “If someone wanted to pin me down for a Iprobably wouldn’t have one.” Omar Davis, the director of revenue since 2007, disputed Brentlinger’s $1 billiohn figure.
But the departmeng could not provide a specifi c figure or even an estimatw of unpaid orunderpaid taxes. Janette Lohman, a lawyer with who servec as director of revenue from 1993 to said she has no idea how the departmenf couldquantify delinquencies. Unless filers are auditef or filing discrepanciesare investigated, it is difficult to determine whether they owe more, she Another problem is that the departmenty has no authority to wipe unpaid taxe s off its books, even when the state has no chance of collecting A third issue is the department’s accounting systemw and software.
As recently as four years ago, the departmeng was unable to get its 118 different taxsystemsd — for personal income, sales, business, withholding, cigaretted and other taxes — to talk to one Manual paper reports made it difficult to update information throughout those systems and identifyy delinquencies. Overhauling the syste probably would take years and cost tens of millione of dollarsor more, Brentlingere said. That would require buy-in by the department, the statwe Office of Administration, the governor and legislators a tall orderin today’s economic In September 2004, the Department of Revenue hired of Ohio, to compare various tax recordd and information sources.
Through the June 30 expiratiojn ofits contract, the departmeny paid Teradata $12.5 million for its help in recovering $51 milliob in unpaid and underreported taxes. On July 1, the departmenrt signed a new contract with Teradatsa to expand and update Brentlinger said. In October 2007, the departmeng hired , a New York City-bases receivables management and third-party collections and Houston-based , which billws itself as North America’s largest private collectio agency. IQor contacts taxpayers to try to get them to make good on unpaid taxes or establish apayment plan.
IQor’s subsidiargy and GC Services pursue collectione more aggressively when phone callds andletters don’t do the trick. They can pay personalk visits, notify credit agencies and even work with Griffith said the department canattributde $24.8 million in collections of delinquenr taxes to iQor in fiscal 2008; iQor was paid nearlyu $1.26 million for its services. GC Servicesw collected $4 million and was paid $259,000 in fiscal 2008. He said both contractsz are set to expir ein June. “It’s not fair to taxpayers who pay everyt year for others to slide by and go undefrthe radar,” Griffith said.