It costs about $500 for a round-trip ticket on US Airways from Albany to Pasadena, Calif. A room at the Embassy Suites in that town goes for about $180 a night.
And I’m sure you can get both cheaper if you shop a little harder than I did.
Why do you need to know this? Because New York State has decided not to spend that kind of money — and recoup as much or more than $2 billion a year — to send an official to the Sales Suppression and Detection Techniques Symposium that will be held by California state tax authorities next Monday and Tuesday in Pasadena.
This is the “zapper” phenomenon I wrote a column about a few months ago. Zappers are high-tech cash registers that are all the rage among any company, store or restaurant that is supposed to pay state sales tax on things they sell but doesn’t want to.
Zappers make the sale disappear, eliminating all traces of a tax being owed. New York State thinks it has the situation under control because it audits businesses. People who know this scam think these tax officials are out of their minds and we are losing billions a year in revenue.
California recently passed a law against zappers. New York, the third-most populous state in the nation, behind California and Florida, isn’t even considering such a move.
When I started writing about this back in 2011, I estimated that $400 million in taxes were lost to zappers in New York every year. (California, which has asked permission to distribute my columns at the conference, estimates that its annual losses are $214 million.)
My estimates were apparently wrong. Prof. Richard Ainsworth, director of the graduate tax program at Boston University’s School of Law, thinks New York State is losing $2 billion a year to zappers. Oh, and that’s just from restaurant sales.
Ainsworth, who will be the keynote speaker at the Pasadena conference, said the losses are much worse when you include all the other types of businesses that have registers that zap sales.
“New York is not even going to show up at the damned conference,” Ainsworth groused. California’s coaxing fell on deaf ears, as Albany said no thanks to its requests to attend. At least half the states in the country with sales taxes are scheduled to be in Pasadena.
One way to stop this sales cheating is by compelling stores to attach an electronic device to all their registers to independently confirm sales.
There is a way around this, too. Stores can do cash transactions, and some jurisdictions are hiring spies to spot-check for this.
What has New York done? It’s held meetings. And there was a sting on zappers a few years back. But the state apparently didn’t like the fact that the undercover investigation was so sneaky, so it zapped the sting and left the deceitful registers alone.
I have a piece of the transcript from one of those sting operations, with the zapper salesman pushing his product on an undercover agents. Here’s how it went:
Salesman: “And then I’ll teach you how to do the manipulation part.”
Undercover agent: “That’s — of course, you don’t have to teach them, of course. We don’t want them to know anything about that, right?”
Salesman: “I’m even scared talking to you, ’cause I don’t even know who you guys are.”
Undercover agent: “Ha! ha!”
Well, the salesman didn’t have to worry. He was dealing with New York State. And the joke is on taxpayers.
Let me tell you what I’ll do. If New York State is worried about the cost of sending someone to the Pasadena conference, I’ll pick up one night at the Embassy Suites on my personal credit card. Albany just has to promise me its representative won’t hit the mini-bar or pay-per-view.
Now I’m going to give some quickie reviews of movies I’ve seen at Tribeca this past week. The festival runs for a few more days.
Some of these films — hold onto your seat — don’t have anything to do with money, except that the filmmakers would like to make a profit.
Three Yups is a must-see in my reviews. The worst any film can get from me is 1 Nope. An Aww! is one of those that can go either way — see it if you have nothing to do. (I’m a sucker for anyone who has the guts to spend their hard-earned money making films.)
♦ “Gabriel”: Rory Culkin (Gabriel) is a little off and he wants to reunite with an old girlfriend. Naturally, he obsesses. The Culkin family raises scary boys, and Rory is as freaky as brother Macaulay. I immediately went home and asked ADT to service my alarm system when this was over. 2 Yups.
♦ “The Canal”: A film archivist discovers from grainy footage that someone was brutally killed in the house he just bought. Bad things happen in this Irish ghost story. Rupert Evans, who plays David the archivist, deserves what he gets. He’s married in the film to beautiful Antonia Campbell Hughes, and when bad things start to happen in the house he stays. Get out! 1 Yup because this guy annoyed me.
♦ “Super Duper Alice Cooper”: A documentary about the punk rocker, aka Vincent Furnier, the golf-playing son of a preacher, who was simply playing the part of a bad-assed rocker because — in the beginning — neither he nor bandmates knew how to play an instrument. What a fraud! What a great story! 3 Yups.