ALLTHINGS NEBRASKA
None of us like paying taxes.
But even the Bible says we’re supposed to (“Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” is how I remember it).
Anyway, I about fell out of my chair the other day when reading a probing article by the Lincoln Journal-Star’s Andrew Wegley about the state’s lackadaisical collection of taxes.
When I pay my taxes, I’m expecting everyone else to do the same. But that’s not happening in Nebraska (really it never has) but the number of tax scofflaws is growing.
The story detailed how the amount of unpaid taxes in the state had grown to $269.5 million (enough to pay about 100 college quarterbacks), which was $52.4 million more than just four years ago.
Most of that increase was because fewer folks and companies were paying their state income taxes. Those delinquencies rose by about $42 million over the past four years, to nearly $130 million in total.
The kicker to the story, however, was that the Nebraska Department of Revenue, in its esteemed wisdom, had recently laid off the 11 agents and supervisors whose specific responsibility was to collect these unpaid tax dollars owed to the state, which is basically us.
The layoffs were blamed on the need to cut state spending and balance the budget. An administrator was quoted saying a new-fangled, automated computer system would soon be in place to go after tax cheats.
Well, forgive me for saying “what the heck,” but one of the best strategies to close a debt is to collect the debts owed to you! And someone knocking on your door or calling your phone has to be more effective than some AI computer system.
Every honest taxpayer in Nebraska ought to be outraged by this. We pay our taxes. Why aren’t these other people and firms not? And if they aren’t, why isn’t someone going after them to pay up? After all—it appears plainly to see—the state needs the money.
I used to cover tax issues at the State Legislature. (In fact, I wondered if my tombstone would read, “He could sure write a tax story.) The mantra about tax policy was “what is fair, what can be easily collected, and what, over time, will continue to be paid.”
The fairness part was about everyone paying their fair share. But it also meant that everyone was paying.
In what should go down as one of the greatest quotes of the century, one of the laid off Revenue supervisors told the newspaper: “If you owe taxes in Nebraska and don’t want to pay them, boy, you just hit the jackpot.”
Sure, there can be legitimate disputes over what is owed and what a taxpayer believes should be owed. But work those out—it isn’t a big number of taxpayers who file protests—and collect what is due.
After all, if everyone paid what they owed, it would reduce what all of us have to pay.
I recently wrote a story for the Nebraska Examiner about the state’s 15-year-old effort to “shame” people into paying up their unpaid taxes via a posting of a “wall of shame” of the top tax scofflaws on a state website.
But the same failed businessman who owed more than $2.3 million to the state when the Wall of Shame was created in 2010—amid another state budget shortfall— was still at the top of the list in 2025.
Some Wall of Shame. Federally, it is estimated that the federal government is losing about $1 trillion a year to tax cheats (that’s trillion with a “t”), according to the New York Times. That’s an aircraft carrier full of money that could feed a lot of children, help a lot of people buy houses, pay a bunch of medical bills or pay down the national debt.
Nebraska, too, is losing a growing amount of revenue because some people and companies aren’t paying their fair share. But ho hum—I guess we don’t care.
The solution to any problem is to attack it, not slack off. But that sadly looks like the path being taken by the state right now.
