CCA continues collecting unpaid income tax from Athens residents

As tax season draws closer, area residents who still owe the city income taxes from previous years will soon be getting another reminder.Early in 2012, the city council formed a partnership with the Central Collection Agency (CCA), a company who originally began in 1966 in Cleveland and has now expanded to cities such as Dayton, Akron and now Athens. The company works to collect unpaid income taxes from residents and area businesses and receive five percent of the funds they collect as payment.During Monday’s council gathering, Tina Timberman, the city’s income tax administrator, addressed elected officials on how the process of notifying and collecting those who have not paid their income taxes is going. The Auditor’s Office plans to continue with the process of notifying those who owe money by sending a second round of letters.“We are going to change up the program a bit [for the second letters] and maybe not have such confusing letters and maybe a little softer letter,” Timberman said. “I will apologize, as a tax person I just look at it and it is just information to me, but after sitting down with the taxpayers and reading it with them, it was kind of harsh, so we are looking to soften that up and let them know.”Currently, the CCA has sent 2,197 letters to Athens residents and have received over 400 responses. The responses yielded over $50,000 in bills and $16,000 has been paid from residents to the CCA.At-Large Rep. Elahu Gosney expressed concern from those who received the first letter warning them of the audit by the CCA.“A good chunk of our community is having to do work for this audit and face the stress and deal with the letters and dealing with the uncertainty of not knowing what is going to happen if they cannot find their papers,” Gosney said.Further confusion to regarding how residents will know if they owe money was expressed.“The problem is that when your employer files the taxes for you we have an account in your employer’s name, we do not have an account for everybody that they send us withholding taxes on,” Timberman said. “We do have access to those names but we had no way of providing a list of those people to CCA to eliminate them [from the mailing list].”The Auditor’s Office plans to draft a second letter to explain the process of paying past income taxes within the next two weeks. In the meantime, residents are encouraged to look over their past taxes to know if they owe money.“A few of them thought they were not on the level. At this point, no penalty and interest fees are involved,” City Auditor Kathy Hecht said.