RTAGate: Bygones, Says Seattle Transit Blog Agrees, Tax Error Growing

"Sound Transit HQ" by Seattlest Flickr contributor romulusnr

[ED. NOTE: Seattle Transit Blog strongly disagrees with Brad's characterization of their conclusions. They did some back-of-the-envelope figuring based on Brad's premise, with the intent of downsizing his initial estimate of the possible tax error. They are not interested, apparently, in the looking into the situation further: "But a figure in the low tens of millions of dollars is serious money, enough to do a freeway ramp or other practical project. I’d rather use that money to build a project they participated in the vote for than attempt to reconstruct 12 years of purchase records."]

Since our original post regarding the RTA boundary issues, the local transit community has been in low-rumble mode. Recently, we shared some of our numbers and background with the transit-a-holics over at Seattle Transit Blog, and last weekend, after some more number crunching, they have released an analysis with similar findings. According to STB, the tax error related to the RTA boundary is likely at least 20 times larger than the initial estimate of $3 million in overcharges. STB has calculated that people living in the non-RTA areas could have been incorrectly overcharged by over $60 million in sales tax for their personal purchases since the creation of the district in the mid-'90s.

RTAGate has now grown to at least $65 million in overcharges ($62 million in personal sales tax and $3 million in auto excise taxes). We'll bring you more costs related to this issue just as soon as we replace the batteries in our calculator.