After being turned down for a loan that was to be secured by a CD, I checked my husband's credit to find that he had a $22000 state tax lien placed against him personally. We had business that was incorporated but it was still placed on him. We had no idea that this had happened. Upon investigating it, we found that the NJ Dept of Labor and Workforce had placed a lien on him based on estimated quarterly tax reports from 1999 to 2006. We never knew anything about it because any paperwork the state was sending was being sent to our old address and since the forwarding order had long expired we never got it. Anyway, we come to find that a payroll company that we had nothing to do with, sent in a quarterly report for wages in excess of $65000 in 1999 (meanwhile our company only made $57000 for the entire year). The payroll company just wrote the name of the company they represented, which had the same name as our company (they were in another state but did sales in NJ) but didn't bother to write the tax id number. So someone in the state of NJ upon seeing the two similar company names, just picks one and we are the unlucky choice. I have ultimately gotten the state to realize that this is not our problem and they are in the process of removing everything but it could take weeks to months to resolve it all. In the meantime, we were denied for one loan in spite of it being secured and got a mortgage that we had to pay 9 1/2% on! Can anything be done to the payroll company because of their mistake? I am just so angry about this because we had worked so hard to repair the damage that WE did to our credit to have someone else's mistake cause us problems is infuriating. Thanks!!
You would have to see an attorney to determine whether your damages are enough to either take on contingency, or worth paying to sue the payroll company. You could look into filing a complaint against them, if they are licensed by the state. There may be fines appropriate for submitting reports without complete taxpayer ids. Of course, they will probably claim the state made the error that caused you damages. As far as your continuing damages from delays in fixing this, the state might move faster if you put pressure on them thru either an elected state representative, or thru the governor's office. It shouldn't take months to fix your reports when they already know they screwed it up. And yes, regardless of what the payroll company did, the state screwed it up.
