How Does California Locate Taxpayers and Their Assets? So this is actually a very interesting subject and something that we as tax practitioners talk about quite frequently so the first way the California tracks you is through any filings that you do with a statement so example everybody in California files a tax return with the Franchise Tax Board and you have an address on them so they use the address based on your your ftv returns and the addresses that are submitted to third parties like banks and credit institutions and things like that. To track your current information number two is they pull your credit report so the same credit report that you can pull through experience or TransUnion the state of California has access to and they can use it to locate tax payers and their assets number three is California gets data from the IRS so the IRS has a much more expanded database of tax payer information and particularly particularly for tax payers that have moved out of California or might be in other places the federal government is often a much more reliable and more accurate source of information.

The next thing they do particularly if they're serious is they use a program called accurate and what accurate is accurate is a massive public records database so as you think about it you and I go through our daily line we have utility bills we have a driver's license we have voting records all these things are available and can be made public record and so what accurate does is accurate calls all of that information into a database that the Franchise Tax Board agents and the government agents and law enforcement and all these varying degrees of people have access to and it's very very good and specifically focused on helping helping them find you very quickly there's actually a limited tool available for like on the civil side if you're looking for like a judgment debtor or something like that but accurate is the tool that they use to really locate people and the final thing that they use which really shouldn't come as much of a surprise is collection agents who go on the internet they do Google searches they look on social media and they have an increasing reliance on those sources of information plus other sources that are called through big data and the reason they do this is because those sources because of the frequency which people interact with them because of the updates and and things like that they're able to get much more accurate and reliable information through those sources so that's the way the California attracts people and they're usually pretty good at finding them.