The funny thing is it might take you less time to contact 400+ people and get an answer from each and every one of them than to actually obtain an acknowledgement of wrongdoings from NYC
The bad part is that any compensation from a class action will be split among the class If he won $3 million in a solo lawsuit, he'd see most of that money (minus attorney's fees), whereas being awarded $30 million in a class action with 400+ people will get him less than $75k
Just a thought Louis, but you should scrape that data from the site with the contact info from all those businesses. You never know when the bureaucrats you’re threatening to sue may just make the whole thing inaccessible…
@@CrazyStranger11 You can view most any webpage as pure text/data without images and also without styling applied. Copy/paste the data you want into excel or word etc. Done.
That's what I was thinking. My business would be a small price to pay to save thousands of people from this aggravation and potentially reform the government. The fun part will be finding a buyer for my business
@@rossmanngroup Honestly, I'm not well versed in US common law, and I don't know whether you can even do this, but it sounds like this is a class action suit waiting to happen
Louis, here are a few things to consider: 1. The City of New York is "self insured". No insurance companies are involved if you file suit. 2. As a result, the City has concocted a Byzantine, set of court rules that any who sue must obey. It's convoluted, deliberately complicated, and counterintuitive. That's why it is very, very, important that an *experienced specialist* handle any resulting civil action! 3. Class Action suits are also a speciality, but the payoff's are higher, so attorneys are more willing to take a case on contingency. 4. If you can find other examples of this, happening on other days, it could be huge. Do a search for all unpaid warrants & see if any other amounts are duplicated. Good Luck.
@@JohnTheRevelat0r I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure it would have been much easier for the business to obtain financing if these warrants weren’t out. That is probably the angle to go for.
@@ahmad_alhallak there are decent odds it does. businesses/individuals can request the list of documents lenders used to assess their application. (ie: their credit history as the lender knew it)-- if they lenders saw the lien, it would be in that file, and thus easily provable that it was used (in part) to deny or limit financing. Lenders also oftentimes write some reasonings on these documents, so it could explicitly say "identified as riskier due to existing lien" (which is, of course, a slam dunk)
@@JohnTheRevelat0r His damages include sub-prime lending, all the higher than average fees that resulted in, missed opportunities to move to better business locations, get better leases, get financed to buy better equipment. It's completely reasonable to demonstrate the opportunity cost.
@@ahmad_alhallak here's the problem: he'd have to PROVE that this is the proximate cause of him not gettting financing. Because no bank ever told him the reason, that's kind of impossible.
No. HELL NO! Do not sell your business over this! Fund a lawsuit with those other 400 businesses, open a go fund me, I don’t care. I'm even willing to chip in with a donation myself. But do not sell your business! After all, the lien was filed against it, not you. If you sell it, you no longer have any recourse against New York. (Also, I think you owe it to your employees to get the business through the transition to another state and make sure things run smoothly at the new place before you hit them in the face with another big change.)
He _definitely_ owes it to his employees.. The people who've been loyal and were already working with him in NY, but uprooted their lives, just to follow him to TX and work for him there. Selling off the business to fund a lawsuit like this would be a huge slap in their face and is pretty fucked up if it actually happened. It's _not_ worth ruining his and their livelihood over it. 👌
@@R3TR0R4V3 I don't think I would go that far with it... But given that Louis was staying in NY for so long for his employees sake, it did surprise me to see him say he considered selling the business.
I've experienced unethical tax audit departments, too. I live in Colorado, and the tax auditing department of the third-largest municipality fined my ex-husband for not meeting a collection quota. Like a dolt, he raided our savings to pay it. Hunting for information, we started a PAC and the crap we uncovered was disturbing. I ran for mayor just to keep digging what I found blew my mind. No one does a thing. I've had some fun encounters with cops entering my property illegally due to all this. This was over a decade ago. Part of me misses jumping into the fray. I wish you luck, sir. I pray you can make the difference I failed to make.
Several people in the comments have made good suggestions. I would just like to say a few things. First, we would be very sad to see you sell your business Louis. I believe there are other ways to hold these guys accountable without you needing to do so. If you're not able to find a lawyer interested in handling this either from a contingency or civil advocacy perspective, then I would suggest opening a fund for people to contribute to legal fees associated with holding New York accountable. I would like to support you in this effort as I'm sure many others would. Second, it's important to keep in mind that there are 400 cases of this happening on this exact same day for this same amount, however it's very possible that this has happened in other instances. That may be hard to identify, but if this is caused by i.e. a software bug instead of just a clerical error then there could have been tens of thousands of erroneous warrants created... not just 400. Finally: Even if it's just a clerical data entry error (which is certainly possible), why are there not any mechanisms in place to prevent or catch these errors given the consequences that they have? This is severe negligence even if it's not intentionally malicious. I appreciate you uncovering this situation and doing the work that you're doing to investigate it and bring it to light. Sorry that this affected you and your company so negatively, but perhaps there can be good which comes from this through your work here. Best wishes for you Louis, carry on good sir.
If he got 100 of those businesses to split the cost of those lawyers, they'd be paying that 800$ lawyer 8$ an hour individually. Louis needs a class action.
I agree, malicious intent would be hard to prove, but so would clericle or software error as cause. It should also be stressed, as you brought up, that there was nothing to catch this before it caused unjust financial discrimination. Additional questions, who should be the defendants? NYC tax and collections for the error? The programming company? Could the state then sue the programming company? Could we finally see upgrades to systems or at least removal of reliance on them and a return of human touch and thus "new jobs" created to fulfill the roles the computer messed up on?
Don't run for NY office, they always corrupt you look at AOC, anti-war Dems, pro peace folks, balanced budget pol, tea party, contract with America, etc. Etc. Etc. The list is long of the system changing you. You don't change the system.
Every time I think this cant get any worse, it does 10x. You found out on your own after y e a r s. And there was noone in NYC who even had an idea they screwed hundreds of people for a decade...insane
As a programmer the first thing that comes to mind is that... it's a bug. Someone ran a batch program in production that had a bug in it and it hasn't been cleaned up yet. They may not even be aware of it (or the programmers are hoping no one noticed or missed it themselves), so the first course of action you should take is to point out all this information to them, mentioning especially all of them having the same (similar) start dates and identical amounts. The identical amounts scream programming bug to me.
@@johnv8762 It's a huge oops, and the blame (should it be true) should fall on the group that created the software. Something wasn't tested properly, someone didn't have the insight to think about "what if" scenarios, it may not even be the fault of the programmers if their specs were off and they coded to spec. It's definitely a mess though.
@@grumpysanta6318 If there's a lawsuit there, then you sue everyone and either let the court decide how liable everyone is or let everyone who is liable decide among themselves how much of the settlement each is responsible for. (Which way you assign liability among the parties depends on the jurisdiction, and I'm neither a lawyer nor a New Yorker, so I have no idea which way they do things in New York courts.) Either way, though, as the plaintiff it's not up to you to assign blame to one entity when there's more than one potentially involved; you just find everyone who _could_ be at fault and convince the court and jury that someone needs to pay for it, and then let someone else determine to what degree everyone involved was at fault and, therefore, how much of the settlement they're responsible for. In this case, I'd guess it's one or more NY state departments, definitely including tax enforcement, and whoever made the software that caused the problem, if it was indeed a bug and not just someone selecting a column or row instead of a single cell in Excel (which, if everyone else's notices also got sent to that PO box in Maine, is probably what actually happened).
looks more like all those businesses had a proxy/temporary account created in the interim, but it wasn't transferring the data real account and was not terminating the old ones. it's funny they all have the same amount of debt on them, which means there was a data overspill. for the accumulation number being too low so overwriting the value is more likely. 1551.52 - is probably the real number of the last one of those businesses updating the value before the bug was mitigated. but nobody cared or was smart enough to go get the operational yield analyzed to fix it too.
Louis, I recommend contacting the Institute for Justice. If all or most of these people got screwed the same way you did, then I believe that you have grounds for a class action lawsuit, and if the Institute for Justice gets on board then you will not have to sell your business in order to get justice. Edit: They could also help with the legwork in contacting all those businesses to inquire about weather or not they knew they had warrants issued on them.
Jup. Its totally fair to claim a number in the nine million range for Louis alone. Times 400 would be a 3.600.000.000 dollar lawsuit against NYC. Any lawyer that sees a chance to win that by getting a percentage will jump at this opportunity.
I would love to see the IJ represent this and I would love to see if a lawsuit actually occur that it get shared to some of the legal UA-cam Channels such as Steve Lehto, The Civil Rights lawyer just to name two. My father watches these channels all the time and it is insane some of the stories they cover on how badly people get screwed over.
Make sure and take screen grabs (And printouts if possible) of all the information. You know very well that when someone in that office sees this video all that information is going to disappear. That’s exactly what happened with that girl that worked for Yelp and had her friend commit libel against you. When you brought it to Yelp’s attention it immediately disappeared, and if I remember correctly before you took screen grabs so you could sue them and her for it.
A company I worked for received a sales tax due notice from the state for a oddly large amount when we hadn’t sold anything taxable. The state explained that it was an amount they picked to get attention from businesses who hadn’t declared any sales tax for that quarter. There could be thousands of businesses that got a bill for that same amount and many may not have challenged it especially if that notice was sent to the wrong address.
You should check if this situation is liable for a class action lawsuit, then contact all other 399 companies to inform them about what you discovered and if they're interested in joining in. Could they be in the same situation where the mail is getting forward to the same PO Box as yours? That would be the cherry on the cake.
Yeah, I wouldn't waste my time and money suing this alone. If you can make it a class action then the lawyers will line up to work on it for "free" instead of you having to pony up the expenses up front. I know it's the land of the free and the home of the lawyers but is your mental health going to get better by spending the next several years in court fighting a losing battle with your own money?
@@ruukinen Will it get better if you let them step on you over and over again and push you down lower and lower? Just because it may hurt doesn't mean it is the wrong choice, predatory companies rely on your logic. For you to give an inch because it won't hurt for a mile... only for them to take enough inches for a mile.
Think Louis stirred the nest enough now that NY state crooks got sweaty and purged all mention of the said PO box. Hence he found as much in the last phone call.
Also if possible run a query sorting lien amounts by size looking for other clusters of identical amounts. Their software should be doing this automatically to flag possible problems. I'm certain it would be doing so if the extra liens were a problem for the agency generating them.
If you want to sue, keep in mind that attracting more attention can also cause the people behind everything to start covering their tracks. I'd take screenshots of everything before releasing more information on your channel, just in case everything disappears overnight
it's almost certainly some kind of scam run by state employees. and you can bet they will start destroying evidence as soon as they find out louis is on to them.
Louis, you need to know this. None of those businesses are active anymore. They all were designated to inactive on 08/31/2016, it even shows that at 1:58 in this video. They've all been dissolved, I went through them all. Only a couple still exist but they were revamped as a new corporation, usually with "2" tacked onto the end of the business name. It's extremely likely that there was some 4 year grace period given for payment of some type, none of them paid it, and were dissolved as a result. Yes, there was a clerical error with the wrong address on file But what's even more concerning is that somehow your business wasn't dissolved when clearly it "should have been" in their books.
If it's the same as Louis' case, those were temporary licenses for startups. The actual company might still be there. Also, that list is 400+ companies that have the lien on them as of now. How many companies found out about it one way or another and either paid or got it resolved? What I think happened there, is that some database task, that gets run every so often, looks for unpaid fees and taxes, triggered that lien process. Nobody checked them for the validity of any of them. And the software didn't take into account that the license numbers were temporary and further taxes would be paid on another, permanent license number. I wonder if that bug is still there. I do suspect though, that at least "Final Boss" knows about it and very carefully avoided admitting the issue. As for the others, who would make a reference to a known bug in the NY tax system, on a call that "may be recorded for quality assurance" ?
@@peregreena9046 Good points. It's important to hypothesize benign explanations and see if there is evidence for them. All of this though doesn't address how he didn't get any indication of this until years later. Them doing this automatically would have been a minor issue if he'd gotten notification in 2016.
This is the kinda "clerical error" that suppresses small businesses ability to function en mass, and also potentially steals thousands of dollars from these people. You see this kinda stuff in a lot of billing companies, where they send a bill twice, do an accidental charge, but it just so happens to thousands of people all at once. Some catch it, some don't, for some it's inconsequential so they don't care. What you should do as of right now is find a way to estimate how much this potentially cost you in losses, even if it's all theoretical. If it prevented you, and others, from getting financed and contributed to closure, or presented any other problem... that could be a large number, and with it happening to many... that could be a massive massive class action suit. I would absolutely take this info to a lawyer and as many of those businesses as possible... and as soon as possible. People who say it's just a whoopsie and it's no big deal are idiots or liars.
Louis is worth roughly a million now. If he could finance himself in the past 7 years, that would be 10 million easy. 9 million damages times 400 is a whopping 3.600.000.000 lawsuit.
-_-.... the hospital billed my mom for emergency surgery for a surgery planned months ahead (was a knee scope) ... difference in cost / 600 dollars i think at the time versus 10,000... when my mom noticed the error on her bill and went to address it / the person at the hospital my mom talked to about the billing error just said well your insurance already paid for it so what does it matter? the company she worked for was self insured... and was an insurance company.... in the end after the company lawyers got involved the surgery was 0$ but yea... bs like this is part of the reason for rising health costs...
a friend of mine worked for a utility company with about 1 million customers. once he made and error and all customers got ~$3 (a different currency) higher bills. there was 1 complaint. ~$3mln more paid this month.
I am weird and never comment on YT vids but I have been watching your channel since I was 14 and the amount that I have learned from just this channel has literally changed my life and it was through people like you that I learned to not take NO for an answer when an unfair roadblock is in my way and I have been inspired many times through your resilience and willingness to share the good and the bad. I hope that no matter what happens you do you what you think is best but with you at the helm I cannot possibly begin to imagine a better person to fight for, not only yourself, but also those 400 other business owners. Who knows how many more they screwed over like this...
@@EternalResonance their production staff would never allow them to investigate NYS. that would never happen based upon Home Box Office's parent companies.
@@EternalResonance I think you're grossly overestimating the desire of HBO->AT&T->Vanguard to promote Louis, his message that directly clashes with their business models, and distress Oliver's mostly left-leaning audience with tales of gross incompetence and corruption in Democrat-run states.
The question that's burning in my mind is "Were you ever notified, and if not, was there a PO box in Maine on their duplicated record?" The followup question to that is "Is there a corporation that started around Jan '12 that had a PO box in Maine that somehow got duplicated to all these businesses?"
That's my question too; but I think that if a PO box in Maine was getting 400 bogus tax letters (or even if 400 PO boxes in Maine were getting them), then the USPS would have reached out to NY state. Or there would be a story in the Maine local newsmedia.
I think the UPS worker he talked to would have mentioned something like "our records don't go back that far, but there is an old legend circulating around the office about hundreds of warrants being served here at once".
There is a simple explanation for this. This day, the state filed warrants against all of the companies that failed to file their first tax forms. In 2012, the number of new business applications was 2.58 million. Assuming equal distribution amount the states, 51,600 were started in NY. I bet there were actually more in NY. 400 of those failed to file their first tax form.
Probably an echo chamber. 99% of the people Louis calls probably won't want to spend more than 5 minutes of their lives on such a campaign. And that's why New York and similiar cities can continue doing what they're doing.
Well if this dude is a nobody, he got over a million nobodies following him?!?!?!?! For what, I haven't a clue. Must be something good I guess like exposing corrupt government. But honestly there are people out there exposing world wide fraud that'll destroy our entire world economy that don't have a tenth the following this guy has. I don't get why he's so popular? Somebody want to enlighten me?
I wonder how many of those warrants also had incorrect addressing. I wonder if there's an incentive structure that was taken advantage of for some employee at the DTF. I really feel that you're on to something much bigger than any of us realize.
Louis, you absolutely should pursue this, but not at the cost of your business. You have over the course of your channels existence introduced us to Farm right to repair stalwarts and an honest realtor in Manhattan. I am sure you find a lion of an attorney who will take this on contingency. My gut feeling is a few paralegals start digging into this and the truth will reveal a lot more. You understand more than most how difficult it is to be a small business and the oppression that New York bureaucracy causes. Use your position and platform to help those that couldn't fight have a voice. And if nothing else, crowdfund this. I can eat Ramen for a while to watch New York have to pay up.
Absolutely. Not at the cost of your business, as @MCuervo says. Why? Because you could win, you could win big and the week after you'd won NY would be pulling the same sort of stunts like nothing had ever happened.
It's not a major coincidence that they were started in 2012. From your story we found that they thought you didn't file tax your first year because of the mixup. It's likely that 1551.52 is a generic penalty for a company that failed to file taxes the first year. Because it's the first year they can't estimate the taxes missed. So if the penalty is 1200$ (for example) plus 3 years or so of interest at 351.52$, all of the warrants would have the same fee. Though it could be a mistake that hit all those businesses. I am just saying the amount makes sense based on the story you were told. I bet most of them also had the issue where they filed on their proper tax ID and not the temporary one. The major error is that they can't tell those numbers are linked. That is worth a lawsuit.
@@queazocotal Unless the temporary ID not linking to the proper tax ID issue had been resolved. Tho, to be fair, there seems to be only two dates that this has happened - if you started your business on Jan 18 or Jan 17 in 2012 - so someone messing up the data entry sounds more plausible. Still, messing up the data entry for 400 companies (that make their life as a company a lot harder) is still grounds for lawsuit.
Yes it's most likely a mistake, but the fact that they won't take responsibility for it and that "error" damaged all of those businesses from getting credit (and most of those businesses probably don't even know about the tax warrants) it does indeed warrant a lawsuit - a class action suit to be precise.
Like other people have said in the comments, don't sell your business. If you really want to go forth with a lawsuit, then set up a GoFundMe when you know the full extent of the lawsuit costs, and I assure you me and most of your audience will be willing to donate to your cause. Also, someone mentioned that these businesses are mostly terminated, so I don't know if you could contact them necessarily. Maybe you can contact the business owners and ask them about how the situation went down if you can. However, I'm not an expert nor a business owner, so I wouldn't know what can be achieved from that. And don't forget to state that you love life and you would never kill yourself. Not even being facetious here, considering what kind of people seem to be involved in all this mess.
You're spot on. $20 to watch it play out will be impossible to turn down for so many. If 3% of his subs chuck in 20 there's more than a million bucks right there.
Yeah, the company is something that is actually constructive. You don't sell it, especially after you've already moved to a more competent jurisdiction.
Hi Louis, 350 businesses have 1,558.94 dated 08/02/2016. I have checked a few but they are coming up as being started in December 2011. I think I could find the same for other amounts. Tip of the iceberg?
Could be! I have found it happening on multiple days not just 08/02/2016, so the total number could be insane. But it's 3am so this is for tomorrow unless someone in a better time zone does it first.
Seems only a few months apart. Louis's was Jan 2012? They probably went through every couple weeks and did hundreds to juice revenues? Certainly seems like the tip of the iceberg.
Louis should see this comment and in my opinion also jump on destiny's stream to talk with him and pisco about it and consider a crowdfunded class action lawsuit or something like that ~
@@PhilNEvo He should not go on any political streams. He will alienate half his audience, and his right to repair movement is decidedly bi-partisan. Maybe he can go on Breaking Points, but even then I would be leery of the idea.
The strangest part about all of this is how the warrant got sent to Maine while the actual business address continued receiving everything else. And then, of course, discovery of the Maine address only for Mafia Man to later state that it never existed on file. Hanlon's razor is something I always try to keep in mind, but at some point there are too many coincidences piling up. I'm not ruling out incompetence just yet, but this whole situation reeks. I agree with the suggestion of starting a GoFundMe for this, because it would be a shame for this to get swept under the rug, even if it was just a screwup.
I bet every single company apart from 1, that has a correspondence address in Maine, has a duplicate account with the correct address. Training issue, failure to convert temp account to permanent, and creating second permanent when updated ID received. Or a data merge failure when digitisation of system happened. I would put good money on a no malice outcome.
No Malice intended does not mean no harm was done. There's a reason negligence is also considered criminal in some cases, what matters is how issues get resolved once they get to light, regardless of how they occurred. Sweeping it under the rug claiming "that address never existed on file" when there's proof of the opposite means someone is not taking accountability for a mistake that was made, where their responsibility was to make sure things went right. Mistakes happen, and should not be punished assuming the person who made the mistake is dilligent enought to rectify it.
In Stevens Point Wisconsin there is an evil hospital (St Michael's) that "accidentally" sent out a very vague bill to thousands of people for $500. Most people paid it, but several, including my uncle, hadn't been there in ages and started asking questions. We will never know how much money they kept from that scam :/
That's reminiscent of an old scam. The scammers would watch the obituaries and when someone died, send a bill for some small amount for something like plumbing repairs or somesuch. These bills would often get paid because the executors of the estates assumed it was a valid bill.
If NYC and NYS were held adequately accountable, even a fraction of the consequences they unload on regular individuals who's lives they don't blink an eye over ruining, for every incidence where NYC did horrible things, there wouldn't be a NYC, period. The City would have been bankrupted and dissolved over a century ago, the state would have been shattered into a bunch of pieces, decades ago.
Don't sell your business to sue New York. Although you may wish it doesn't ever happen to anybody again, I can guarantee you that it will - and you lost control of your business. And as mad as you may be, and Lord knows I don't blame you, it's really not your problem in particular any more. What you need to do is embarrass these idiots. And you are doing that just fine. Ideally you should get at them through corporate media as well.
i think part of the reason he may wish to sell is to get rid of ALL that is acociated with nyc and might want to make a new one free from the touch of nyc
I like how everyone telling Louis to sell his business meanwhile forgetting if this fails or a judge doesn’t fall into favor with Louis he’s soured his reputation. The silver lining is if Louis wins, he will have money to retire. That’s about it.
Honestly the most horrifying thing about seeing this pattern is the question of "If it happened in this one particular instance/date and time, how many times has it happened before or since?" How many other people got screwed and didn't even know?
Chris Flynn already documented following in this discussion: "If you look at the 400+ $1558 Warrants they were all incorporated in 12/2011 and the 400+ $1567 warrants were 11/2011. Eight for $1573.21 were 10/2011, three for $1542.89 were 02/2012 so a few stragglers. Nothing similar happened in Aug 2014/15/17/18 as best I could see." So it seems that it has happened multiple times and every time the warrant has been close to $1560 but not exactly that.
Go for it, but please don't sell your business.. As if the case goes nowhere, you lose your business and savings and the bullies do win... Instead do what you doing now to raise awareness and investigate. And hopefully you will find more passionate people of the cause to join you, from the video's it looks like you won't have to look far to get additional help and support to build a case .. Slowly but eventually you will fight this and win that way!
Louis, you have an audience here. There are people who are absolutely willing and able to help you out in this stuff simply to help you out. If for nothing else than with grunt work like calling 400 people for you. You have the option of calling in favors from your viewers for things other than money.
Since the Final Boss reacted as if this wasn't the first time he'd dealt with this, I'd suggest finding the pattern beyond the group of businesses that were in that one batch. He fixated on if you had multiple ID numbers, which means he probably hears cases like this enough that this isn't a one off. It could be every time (trigger event) happens everyone sharing (fixed data point here) ends up sharing (multiple data points here) like.... registration dates inheriting mailing address and warrants. The naysayers might be right: It could be an error. But an error someone keeps around through malice or stupidity is just as bad. Make enough noise to force this source of grief to get fixed, and get whoever didn't care that it's broken *or* wanted it broken put in the spotlight.
If the data could be scraped into a database or whatnot, then afair it's a relatively simple query to group by a couple fields (i.e. date and amount owed) and filter count greater than 1, sort by count descending, etc. That would give you a list telling you if it's a reoccuring pattern and how big the scale is and where to look for the duplicate entries. It might find some false positives but really the odds seem small for legit warrants being the same amount on the same day (for taxes anyway).
@@sigilbaram All internet data can be scraped, there are plenty of tools for that, it just takes a bit of time to create a program with a routine for that. The simpler the website, quicker it is to implement a tool for that.
Even if it is an error, the state government has a moral and fiduciary duty to be accurate and accountable in their enforcement, which gives Louis (and all these other businesses) standing for real damages. For any other entity, it would be an easy case to demonstrate gross negligence and resulting harm. Of course, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the state has carved themselves out an exception for when they fuck up, just like with police.
That money from selling your company can get away from you real quick in a hurry with lawyer fees and whatnot, and you'll likely be in it for multiple years. Not something I'd advise. They WILL find ways to drag this on and on and on until you've exhausted yourself. And we are not just talking about money, these fuckers will chew you up and spit you out until a noose looks like your new best friend. I know someone who had an experience like that, luckily her husband found her before she could do the deed. See if a class action lawsuit with the other people is possible. Don't be the only guy who's getting shot at, spread the love. But know that you being involved will still mark you as the main target, since you are likely going to be the guy with the biggest public presence of all involved. And to those here who say he should go ahead and just fucking do it: Gee, it sure is nice to talk a big game when it's not your own livelihood that's on the line.
I agree he should team up and do a class action. He also should set up a fund we can all donate to! I do not think he should be selling his business for this!
Wow, this goes deep. It's amazing what you've uncovered so far. This kind of thing should definitely not happen at all, but most certainly not at this scale. This is the state against the people.
You need to get in touch with every one of these guys and do a class action lawsuit against the city of New York. I swear dude, I bet you'll get a huge payday out of this!
The way that guy consistently refused to answer your questions and instead said "Well let's just take a step back" and answered a different question you didn't ask - that's just straight up a standard tactic to deflect and control the conversation.
That's when you go broken record, ie "That wasn't the question I asked. I asked you ______" then keep repeating word for word the exact same question until they either answer, or get mad and hang up."I don't know" isn't good enough. Do your job. Find the answer. I expect you to know things. Then repeat daily until they either answer you (more than 'i dunno') or they stop taking your calls. Then you find another way to be a gad fly to their nonsense.
Looks like the court played phone tag until they found a psychopath on the payroll that was able to handle the situation by lying to your face and made it seem like you did something wrong.
I worked on software in the past for county governments, assessors, treasurers, etc. (not for NY but for other states) and to me this looks like a bad data migration / repair. What will often happen is weird things are going on with the accounting of all the records and the government officials will call support for help. Some software developer will try and figure out how to fix whatever the problem is and might run SQL scripts against their database to correct. We would commonly have situations like this where we need to reverse a bunch of transactions and re-create them or create new ones and if you're not careful you can screw it up. Not saying that's 100% the case here but it just feels quite familiar to me. The software developers are often the only ones with a complete understanding of all the rules of collecting tax and making the system work.
And sysadmins can only try to fix an issue if they are informed about its existence. So, some office clerk has to NOTICE there’s an issue, deem it important enough to REPORT it, probably to a superior. And if that superior deems it to be an actual problem, THEN it maybe gets reported to sysadmin. Flawless.
It could be, but can you imagine the post office getting 400 letters from New York for 400 businesses, at a PO Box in Main? Can you imagine renting that PO Box and getting all that mail? How could NY not know about it? NY does not care.
Can confirm. I work in pension administration (so lots of town/state govt accounts), so not exactly the same as Tax areas but likely close enough. There are a lot of old systems out there that were cutting edge in the 80s. Systems that are very easy to make a mistake on, and very difficult to find/fix mistakes when they happen. I see it all the time. One sloppy SQL statement or fat-fingered copy-paste error in excel and that it... And these old mainframes don't have the same level of audit control as modern systems.
Couldn't the similar dates also just be a yearly scheduled event. For example, if the flag is active X years after creation, add to warrant event. This to me would explain all the 2012 companies having warrants in 2016. Should look into 2015/2017 if there is a similar event with companies started in 2011/2013 respectively.
I think you should only contact a few of em. If they were also screwed, you should get a lawyer to do the rest. This could potentially be the beginning of a class-action lawsuit, or such, I believe. I'm no legal expert, but I did hear that it might be easier to finance lawyers for this since they make money from the class action as well. Could also be epic if you end up recruiting some of those business owners to finance a lawsuit, rather than go class action.
Louis, especially now that this video is out there, you should go in and save all of the information you need for an eventual lawsuit in case they decide to take it all down or blacklist your IP
it would be very hilarious when NYC blacklists all of Texas. I mean, there is the argument that querrying hundereds of records could act as a denial of service attack. I mean: Louises phone calls are a denial of service attack - by making one phone call and asking one simple question he is burdening the NYC tax and court system in a way it was not designed to handle.
While this may have happened to 400+ people in this instance, the next question should be: are there any more instances of the same 'glitch' getting triggered and doing the same thing to other batches of 300+ other people and companies or was your batch an isolated incident? If it was a bad script, you either were caught in a batch that didn't get cleaned up once the glitch got identified or there may be many more batches out there.
Not isolated, I've read a comment there's another batch in 2016. Quote: "it is not just the 400! on 1st of August 2016 you find 113 companies with the exact same amount!"
Oh programming error… for sure. Is there a means to pull the data off the sight and script it to show the patterns cleanly? I would wager it’s using some unsanitized SQL
@@themanhimself3 gotta be careful that cannot be done legally if your not being asked to pen test their servers and have a contract written up to do so. The goal is to grab the data legally not illegal stuff.
@@icefireobsidian7490 Could easily write a script to dig through their DB for other instances of this, but boy-oh-boy am I not touching government data like that.
If you look at the 400+ $1558 Warrants they were all incorporated in 12/2011 and the 400+ $1567 warrants were 11/2011. Eight for $1573.21 were 10/2011, three for $1542.89 were 02/2012 so a few stragglers. Nothing similar happened in Aug 2014/15/17/18 as best I could see.
It seems very interesting that all these "clerical mistakes" have so closely similar sums. Makes you wonder if this amount goes just below some legal limit where it often goes under the radar, which would suggest this has been intentional.
@@MikkoRantalainen Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. The similar values all seem to correspond to a computer attributing a start value then calculating by time. This seems like a training issue, whom ever set up the proper accounts was unaware that they had to remove the temporaries, and then person setting up the temporaries copy pasted an address they had previously assuming the address would be correctly updated when temporary had been changed into a permanent. I bet a search of the correspondence address in Maine would pull up all the companies involved, and every single one would have a duplicate account with a correct address.
This is huge, there’s no way this is some random thing, absolutely either a clerical screw up, or something more targeted. Absolutely follow this through BUT DONT SELL YOUR BUSINESS
Louis, if you're seriously considering legal action, be very careful what you say in these videos, maybe even consider deleting or editing and re-uploading some of them. Defense council will watch all this and twist your words and use ANYTHING they can to diminish your case. BIG ALOHA from Seattle!
I left a comment on the first video about this saying I'd like to hear what a lawyer has to say. Now that we know over 400 people are very likely in the same boat I think it's necessary to speak with a lawyer. The fact that the Burwick P.O box was completely redacted from the record so quickly is more than a red flag, it's a damn signal flare. I'm concerned that poking around for answers caused them to delete details from the other people's files too. If there's a reputable New York lawyer on UA-cam that would be willing and able to help that would be great. That way we all can be kept in the loop, as much as is allowed of course.
Sounds like a test file got dropped into the wrong environment during a systems test. Or possibly someone was hand editing the database with an update query, and accidentally submitted the query before all of the criteria for the where clause were written. If this person had auto-commit turned on, then they couldn't roll-back the change.
The last part makes a lot of sense. Especially with mail getting sent to a PO box Louis doesn't know anything about. The same update may have inserted that address on every one of those warrants.
@@thealienknight Test files should be though benign. Not dump an actual legal related issue. this whole ordeal at this point could fall under a really complex head spinning defamation lawsuit. Under the pretense of the potiential damages this "test" could have had. This "test" could be grounds to argue that Louis and all the other falsely charged parties should be credited for the false crime claims. If Louis and others choose to pesue this this could throw everything that NYC claims as lawful current or past claims of wrongful incidents in question. This is a massive can of worms that I wouldn't be surprised if NYC and NYS would be DESPERATE to pay up hush money ASAP. Watch a third of the current what 100 million or billion dollar funding that NYC had planned suddenly dissapear. Over trying to keep their current credibility. As if this gets out it could be the perfect evidence why like president Trump can throw out NYC's tax fraud claims. "Your honor the state of NY has been falsely trying to expedite money from other state company owners as such I have reason to believe all charges being pressed against me are also falsely created in the hopes that I and many other buisness owners wouldn't notice. As such we believe that ANY and all state related tax claims by NYS should get thrown out."
The worst part about this is that the Rossman side of the lawsuit will have finite resources while the New York side of the lawsuit will have nearly unlimited resources to defend itself at taxpayer expense and the people who made the mistake will never pay a single cent.
I have a sneaking suspicion it probably did happen like you thought, and the notifications were sent to all 400 businesses at that PO Box in Maine and it did belong to one of the businesses on the list but someone applied one person's tax bill to everyone.
Hey Louis! If you get written statements, or just a list of signatures of some of them who are in that group, a judge can dismiss them all in one fail swoop! I got a parking ticket along with like 50 neighbors, in just the few blocks I walked to see how many there were, because the city of Chicago failed to put up "No parking for street cleaning (with date and time)" signs as they are required to do. When I told that to the judge, she said if I type up the scenario, and get only 20 signatures of neighbors it also happened to, she would dismiss them all and not just those 20, but all issued on that day and area the cleaning was scheduled for. I did just that, and she kept her promise, and boy did my neighbors treat me to some good food n' drink that summer!
the judge did the city a favor. that is illegal and if you guys had the means and managed to catch some press it might have cost the city a pretty penny just dealing with the lawsuit. if it was just you she probably would have forced you to pay and no one would have cared even if you had proof that the city was in the wrong.
@@sarowie If they were made in error, and a proper authority sees and realizes it, it's their duty to dismiss them all, and not really a choice. A court is higher than a city or county department and at least in theory is supposed to be unbiased. I never would have believed it until I did it, and it worked. Every case can of course be different, but to rule it out on a whim would be foolish. One should always try to seek true justice, because chances are you may get it. I think Louis is more interested in admission of fault, and not damages.
Louis, I think holding the bureaucracy to account is a noble pursuit, but not if it's at the expense of your financial independence. I think I can speak for many of us when I say that the reason I like you as a youtuber so much is because of how candid you can be since UA-cam is just a hobby for you and if the channel were deleted tomorrow you would still have your business. If the financial independence that being a business owner affords you is what allows you to fight for right to repair and everything else I think that's more important. Not to say that this isn't important but it's more important to not miss the forest for the trees. If winning this fight means giving up on all the rest I think it's a bad decision. I could be entirely misunderstanding the situation but that's my two cents as I understand it.
You should use a web scraper (if possible) to compile that list of business, warrant status and first filing date. Might make it easier to see how many people it happened to and to contact them
And actually if there is this "coincidence" of more than 500 companies created in January 2012 getting warrants for the same amount in August 2016, there may be other "coincidences" just like this with other warrants of differing amounts. You my man, may have just found a HUGE issue!
These other businesses were not getting "screwed" by the state, they had genuine reason to be fined, likely for not filing certain forms. That's evident by every single one of them being designated as an inactive business on 08/31/2016. The fluke is that somehow Louis' business fell through the cracks and was not shut down.
Fully support you Brother! I hope it does not come to a nuclear option! I’ll stay tune and I hope I can help down the line. Cheers and say hi to Mr. Clinton for me
As someone who knows a thing or two about government software, particularly court software, I want to mention a couple things: First, it is fairly common for many types of notices and documents to be processed in batches. So, the fact that all of these records showed up at an almost identical time in the electronic system isn't all that strange. There are a whole lot of records that are not produced in real time, and only get fully processed on a set schedule, or when an employee runs a particular process. They might sit in a basket for days or weeks, and then all get run on Tuesday nights or something like that. You would need to look at data for other dates to see if this one date was an anomaly, or if it is common for a whole bunch of liens to get processed at once. Second, the amount due being identical looks odd to me. When you produce a bunch of records that all have the same dollar amounts like that it is usually because that amount is a flat fee or fine. If that amount was supposed to represent the back taxes you owed plus any fees and fines, it would be highly unusual for so many lien records to have an identical amount due on them. That data looks more like what you would see if you were processing out a bunch of parking tickets or something like that where there is one extremely common fee that all the accounts are being charged. I don't know enough about how that lien amount is supposed to be calculated, but that many identical numbers tingles my spidey senses. Third, in my personal experience the problem you will likely run into with pursuing this isn't that you can't or won't win. Its that you aren't going to be able to get much in the way of damages to make it worth the effort. To put it bluntly, Courts make mistakes all the time, and in general when those mistakes are discovered they aren't required to do much more than fix the original mistake. So, if they charged you money you didn't owe, and you paid, you could get your money back, probably with interest, but that is it. If the lien is erroneous, you can get it removed. If they screwed up a whole bunch of liens, they may have to go back and review all liens made during a certain period of time. What you aren't likely to get are damages for how a lien might have affected your ability to do business, or to see someone get thrown in jail. You probably won't even see anyone get fired, assuming the person who made the error is even still working there. You would likely need to prove that someone did this on purpose with the intent to hurt everyone who had a bad lien placed on their business before you had a shot at more than just getting the error fixed. So, if you can't get them to fix the lien any other way, sue away, but if you are hoping for more, I think you will be disappointed.
As much as, in Louis's position, I would want to make someone pay, this is probably the unfortunate truth. Courts might not be the best way to go about it. Media coverage is probably the only way to get anything satisfying.
@@dysjectamembra5322 problem is legally they may be insulated in several different ways. That's why I suggested trying media coverage. The more information and the wider spread the better.
You are right, it's going to be very difficult to get much in court. Because (if I understand correctly) he would have to prove in court that this was either maliciously done, or because of recklessness. Additionally, he would need to prove that he incurred damages because of the maliciously/recklessly issued warrant. This would easily cost hundreds of thousands in legal cost. A feasible way would be to get the support of the Institute for Justice or a similar organisation. It's unlikely any law firm would take this case as a contingency case unless they think they could do a class action lawsuit. And that will be difficult because most likely many of these 415 business are not around anymore or have no interest in taking part in legal action. So I think going the route with making people aware of this is probably the most effective. Maybe start contacting journalists and try to get the story out to the general public.
@@myname7021 Considering the error resulted in a failure to provide service of process which was rectified in a series of phone calls, that he monetized no less, not only was there no harm (since ineffective service of process is fatal to any legal action) but he actually gained from the error. Without damages there is no standing for a case.
If there was a person behind this rather than some accident, i.e. trough temporarily editing a script. It should be looked at to see if he/she might have had mallice in hurting a single person or business and hiding it through this mass "error". Proving that might be hard, but might get (more) damages if true. And with the large amount of cases the chance of some connection (including trough family and friends) might well exist.
The other thing worth considering Louis, even if a lawyer wont take the case on contingency, if those other companies are in the same boat as you, would any of them be willing to split costs of legal representation? That would make it a lot more cost affordable no? Edit, since another thought occured to me: Using the youtube platform and networking possibilities it gives, I wonder if it might also be worth reaching out to LegalEagle. He's a lawyer himself, and talks all things law on his channel. He probably wont just hop in and sue New York for you, but he might be willing to do a video collab or something discussing where you might stand from a legal perspective and what you're options might be with you. I don't know, he may not be interested, but if you don't ask you'll never know.
Louis is the only one who got screwed here, every other business on that list was shut down on 08/31/2016, likely for actually not filing (unlike Louis). For some reason Louis' business was not shut down, who knows why
I doubt LegalEagle would collab on something like this, but you never know. More likely to be on this lesser known law channels like @NateTheLayer @RekietaLaw @GoodLawgic @VivaFrei Louis should contact them, maybe they are interested to talk about this and give him their expert opinion on how feasible a lawsuit would be and what his options are.
@@TowerCrisis Hmmm. Interesting. Although, are you sure they were legitimately shut down, and it wasn't part of the screw up? I mean, it seems waaaaaaaaay too coincidental that they'd all have been pulled up on the same day, for the exact same amount down to the cent, and then all be shut down on the same day too...
Lawsuits cost money. You might see if you can interest a non-profit like institute for justice... If that doesn't work you might see if you can get some predatory class action law firm to take this up you're obviously not the only one.
A class action would be handled based on the amount of money the attorney could make. Basically the people agree to the suit and the state of NY would settle and the problem would simply disappear. Nobody but the lawyer is going to take in any money greater than the imposed fine.
@@webreakforsquirrel4201 No to settlements. As you can see this is borderline holy war for Louis Rossmann. Meaning the evil guys must be held accountable and never repeat it. This can be achieved only through an official court order and not a settlement. As it becomes a precedent and other victims can use it to punish future aggression from NY, and potentially in other states.
Wouldn't it be ironic that all of those also had PO box 842 as mailing address for the warrant? In the other video the guy on the phone pretty much said it was an automated system so 400 warrants in a day for a city like NYC is not entirety impossible when you consider the sheer numbers of businesses there, especially in 2016, from the large stock market brokers to the street corner hot dog vendor but the fact they all share the same time of beginning operation, same date of filing, same amount, that's suspect.
I would seriously consider contacting the NY auditor or comptroller. I'm from Canada and normally we have an auditor general which investigates issues like these.
I love watching the evolution of this situation. It's not just about you anymore, it's about a whole helluva lot more. Don't sell your business over it, but do consider finding these people and put together a class action suit.
Don’t destroy your finances (and life) suing them as that goes nowhere, just keep exposing them publicly, spread the information far and wide, this is great! I think there can be some excellent opportunities for your fans to help with organizing all this information and stuff too
Considering that all of these 400+ companies have similar creation dates and the same warrant date, it seems likely to me that this was caused by 1 person, either making a really big mistake, or committing an act of maliciousness before leaving their job. There's a lot of ways that many records could have the same problem. If they process anything through spreadsheets, you could easily get columns misaligned. If they run manual queries on an SQL database, a small mistake in your WHERE clause (or the lack of one) can affect many more records than intended. There may have even been a software bug that existed for that brief window of time before getting patched. I think it's a little disingenuous to claim that it is a systemic problem from just these 400+ warrants. It's been over 10 years since 2012, whoever was responsible might have a different job by now. It would be nice to know what actually happened, but it may be unrealistic to expect to get an answer.
The systemic problems are from the lack of empathy that officials have when you point out problems and ask for help. Incompetence mixed with apathy is indiscernible from maliciousness.
I'm in the UK so my experience doesn't mean much but when people try to hold public organisations to account here they have multiple layers of ways to duck responsibility. They will claim admin error, system error, individual employee error, they will pay a small fine and an internal investigation will rumble on for years and then they will say "lessons have been learned" but 5 years later the same thing is still happening or that everyone involved has now left or retired or they will have some loophole backdoor small print that allows them to do the activity with impunity. I wish you the very best and will support you all the way but my gut tells me a lawsuit will not achieve much.
How about if you can find multiple dates where they did the same thing for multiple other companies? At some point it must be considered systematic and responsibility must be taken.
@@MikkoRantalainen I totally agree with you. Their response would probably be something like "we process a large number of cases every year and a small percentage of errors are within acceptable tolerance" or "clearly there was a training issue and we will look at our policies and procedures to make sure lessons have been learned"
Case in point where a computer programming error resulted the Royal Mail charging, convicting fining and jailing a number of postmasters for imbezzelment (?). I doubt if any of them were ever compensated.
Yeah remember when mr beazt tweeted that he was annoyed at youtuw for allowing his face of those "everyone who visits this site will get x" amount of money then UA-cam responded with will fix it? Yeah those scam ads are still around and I doubt youtibe will fix it anytime soon, I think Mr beast should sue to get the message across that we won't stand for that crap
I’d imagine it’ll be similar to a police department when a cop does something he isn’t supposed to. In where they say something along the lines of “the police department did an internal investigation and nothing is wrong,” or “we suspended/fired the involved people.” But if you look closer, it’ll be a something like a 30 day PAID suspension or on the off chance they are “fired,” they another police department ends up hiring them the day after.
This is absolutely disgusting! I REALLY hope you push this as far as you can! Definitely call the other business owners and hopefully you can come up with a way to start a law suit. I guarantee this has happened before and will happen again. Dont let them get away with this! Your channel is awesome!
Is there any possible legal explanation for that exact amount? Like is that the amount of a specific obscure fine? Or is this just blatant dirty cash grab?
This is supposed to be "unpaid taxes" nothing to do with fines so unless they made the exact same amount of money in the years it's literally impossible
@@DumbArse Missed tax report. Could easily have a fine for the act or missing to file in your report and not for the missed taxes. Its quite literally possible.
@@DumbArse Probably a standardised amount for unknown taxes. "You didn't do your taxes, so we put 1500 on". Getting confirmation on that would probably be impossible through based on what he's gone through so far. Also ties in that they are business of the same age (1st tax year?). Most of those liens are probably correctly applied, and some will be clerical errors like Louis'. There is rarely maliciousness behind these things, just incompetence coupled with no accountability. The biggest thing exposed here is complete clusterfuck of trying to fix THEIR mistake.
@@DumbArse Yeah, I just remember the evil guy said something like "other people can use the tax department for a warrant" or something. Just a thought. I think it's probably malicious, or an error they are trying to hide
I totally understand your frustration and they should 100% be held accountable. I think contacting the other businesses to get in on this is very smart. However you should not let your own business go down over this. If you were to lose your business to fight the New York state where you will probably at most slightly inconvenience them is actually letting them win.
Louis, have you checked to see if there are other similar patterns? It wouldn't surprise me if you found other large sets of warrants all with identical amounts, though different than your amount.
You should definitely not sell your company! Not only because you will lose what you worked for all these years, but also because if you remain the boss of your company, you should have more leverage if it comes to a lawsuit. Rather get together with the other companies and pitch together, maybe do a class action lawsuit. Also you should create a crowdfunding campaign for that, I bet a lot of people will donate for this! I will!
If they did this to 400 people, there is no way they wouldn't know. There must have been someone that already had financing. At that point the bank will have been asking if there were problems. Try to find someone that had this fixed years ago. And yes! Take this to court!
The path of revenge like this can be very self-destructive, Louis. Be careful. Don't go down that path if it costs you your business. Do it only if it's relatively easy for you and doesn't cost you so much.
I appreciate all the content you've made over the years, I just want to put a word in that I don't want to see you ruin yourself or your future over revenge. You're already out of the state, don't throw yourself back in to a toxic relationship if you can help it. I'd love to see you come out of this, proving that you're far better and more successful in Texas than you ever could be in NYC.
Remember that journalist who selected view source code and informed the city about their leaked data? And almost got arrested by the mayor for hacking?
Don't sell your business. If you're determined to sue them another means will come about. You've got some good karma coming your way, and lots people behind you, and your causes. I'd try to contact some people on that list (if possible) and if they got screwed somehow too, then maybe some of you could pool your resources and hire attorneys together. Just a possible idea. Good Luck, Louis!
It could be interesting to call back the nice lady who told you about the PO Box in Maine if she can pull up those warrants and see if they all have that fake address. (no need for security access on your side. Just asking her to open them up and look). Maybe tell you if what she sees troubles her.
@@chaos.corner yeah I was thinking someone was fudging numbers to make a withdrawal from tax payers by creating dummy liens to keep the books balanced while they syphon legit repayments off and keep the dummy lien in its place so $1,000,000+ is sneaked out the back door and on paper nothing is "missing" just a whole bunch of non payers who don't have the ability to raise any red flags as all the mail was sent to a dummy address, with the speed of bureaucrats they probably knew it would be a decade before anyone ever found any proof and everyone else in power are just as slimy and corrupt and would be compelled to brush it under the rug to avoid kicking up the muck and potentially exposing some shit they are involved in
Louis you could try reaching out to some journalists. They usually have the means to reach out to many people, and they might help you out finding a solicitor that will take the case without upfront pay.
The dramaturgy is easily eclipsing Rossmann Realty now
The best performing videos on this channel are where I am being fucked. That's the way.
@@rossmanngroup :hands up: Gachi
@@rossmanngroup - Don't sell your business. Time to start an Only Fans to pay for the legal cost😂
@@terrelleaton6661 need to mention the PP-BUS HOT
@@rodrigogarPretty sure that's what happens when you don't wear proper PPE
The funny thing is it might take you less time to contact 400+ people and get an answer from each and every one of them than to actually obtain an acknowledgement of wrongdoings from NYC
Plus it will help jump start the Class Action Lawsuit!
@@SoftAsFurbeat me to it.
@@SoftAsFur all thisss
Oh, they'll give an answer fairly quickly... It won't be a useful one, but it will be technically an answer.
The bad part is that any compensation from a class action will be split among the class
If he won $3 million in a solo lawsuit, he'd see most of that money (minus attorney's fees), whereas being awarded $30 million in a class action with 400+ people will get him less than $75k
Just a thought Louis, but you should scrape that data from the site with the contact info from all those businesses. You never know when the bureaucrats you’re threatening to sue may just make the whole thing inaccessible…
Absolutely this. Anyone know how?
@@CrazyStranger11 You can view most any webpage as pure text/data without images and also without styling applied. Copy/paste the data you want into excel or word etc. Done.
@@CrazyStranger11 file, save as, plain text
I'll give it a go tonight
Does any of this get archived on sites like waybackmachine?
You should to make sure it doesn't happen to other people
That's what I was thinking. My business would be a small price to pay to save thousands of people from this aggravation and potentially reform the government.
The fun part will be finding a buyer for my business
@@rossmanngroup Also others may not even be aware like you weren't until they see the news of the lawsuit.
@@rossmanngroup Hammer and Anvil? You be the anvil and I'll be the hammer??
Yes. Unequivocally yes.
@@rossmanngroup Honestly, I'm not well versed in US common law, and I don't know whether you can even do this, but it sounds like this is a class action suit waiting to happen
Louis, here are a few things to consider: 1. The City of New York is "self insured". No insurance companies are involved if you file suit. 2. As a result, the City has concocted a Byzantine, set of court rules that any who sue must obey. It's convoluted, deliberately complicated, and counterintuitive. That's why it is very, very, important that an *experienced specialist* handle any resulting civil action! 3. Class Action suits are also a speciality, but the payoff's are higher, so attorneys are more willing to take a case on contingency. 4. If you can find other examples of this, happening on other days, it could be huge. Do a search for all unpaid warrants & see if any other amounts are duplicated. Good Luck.
@@JohnTheRevelat0r I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure it would have been much easier for the business to obtain financing if these warrants weren’t out. That is probably the angle to go for.
@@JohnTheRevelat0r losing financing is an actual serious damage, whether this holds out on court is another matter
@@ahmad_alhallak there are decent odds it does. businesses/individuals can request the list of documents lenders used to assess their application. (ie: their credit history as the lender knew it)-- if they lenders saw the lien, it would be in that file, and thus easily provable that it was used (in part) to deny or limit financing. Lenders also oftentimes write some reasonings on these documents, so it could explicitly say "identified as riskier due to existing lien" (which is, of course, a slam dunk)
@@JohnTheRevelat0r His damages include sub-prime lending, all the higher than average fees that resulted in, missed opportunities to move to better business locations, get better leases, get financed to buy better equipment. It's completely reasonable to demonstrate the opportunity cost.
@@ahmad_alhallak here's the problem: he'd have to PROVE that this is the proximate cause of him not gettting financing. Because no bank ever told him the reason, that's kind of impossible.
Short answer yes. Longer answer, dear god yes. Put the bastards on the spot
No. HELL NO! Do not sell your business over this! Fund a lawsuit with those other 400 businesses, open a go fund me, I don’t care. I'm even willing to chip in with a donation myself. But do not sell your business! After all, the lien was filed against it, not you. If you sell it, you no longer have any recourse against New York. (Also, I think you owe it to your employees to get the business through the transition to another state and make sure things run smoothly at the new place before you hit them in the face with another big change.)
Good point about needing the business to carry through with the lawsuit.
He _definitely_ owes it to his employees.. The people who've been loyal and were already working with him in NY, but uprooted their lives, just to follow him to TX and work for him there. Selling off the business to fund a lawsuit like this would be a huge slap in their face and is pretty fucked up if it actually happened. It's _not_ worth ruining his and their livelihood over it. 👌
@@R3TR0R4V3 I don't think I would go that far with it... But given that Louis was staying in NY for so long for his employees sake, it did surprise me to see him say he considered selling the business.
I've experienced unethical tax audit departments, too. I live in Colorado, and the tax auditing department of the third-largest municipality fined my ex-husband for not meeting a collection quota. Like a dolt, he raided our savings to pay it. Hunting for information, we started a PAC and the crap we uncovered was disturbing. I ran for mayor just to keep digging what I found blew my mind. No one does a thing. I've had some fun encounters with cops entering my property illegally due to all this. This was over a decade ago. Part of me misses jumping into the fray. I wish you luck, sir. I pray you can make the difference I failed to make.
Several people in the comments have made good suggestions. I would just like to say a few things.
First, we would be very sad to see you sell your business Louis. I believe there are other ways to hold these guys accountable without you needing to do so.
If you're not able to find a lawyer interested in handling this either from a contingency or civil advocacy perspective, then I would suggest opening a fund for people to contribute to legal fees associated with holding New York accountable. I would like to support you in this effort as I'm sure many others would.
Second, it's important to keep in mind that there are 400 cases of this happening on this exact same day for this same amount, however it's very possible that this has happened in other instances. That may be hard to identify, but if this is caused by i.e. a software bug instead of just a clerical error then there could have been tens of thousands of erroneous warrants created... not just 400.
Finally: Even if it's just a clerical data entry error (which is certainly possible), why are there not any mechanisms in place to prevent or catch these errors given the consequences that they have? This is severe negligence even if it's not intentionally malicious.
I appreciate you uncovering this situation and doing the work that you're doing to investigate it and bring it to light. Sorry that this affected you and your company so negatively, but perhaps there can be good which comes from this through your work here. Best wishes for you Louis, carry on good sir.
If he got 100 of those businesses to split the cost of those lawyers, they'd be paying that 800$ lawyer 8$ an hour individually. Louis needs a class action.
Also, Louis. ARCHIVE THOSE FUKING RECORDS RIGHT NOW. Expect the bullies to delete those records! (sorry to piggyback)
Don't play games when you are suing The Mob for running a racket.
@@cilismoniker7322notirze even?
I agree, malicious intent would be hard to prove, but so would clericle or software error as cause. It should also be stressed, as you brought up, that there was nothing to catch this before it caused unjust financial discrimination.
Additional questions, who should be the defendants? NYC tax and collections for the error? The programming company? Could the state then sue the programming company?
Could we finally see upgrades to systems or at least removal of reliance on them and a return of human touch and thus "new jobs" created to fulfill the roles the computer messed up on?
If Louis gets millions from a class action lawsuit he should straight up run for office for fixing 400 peoples lives.
Class action the shit out of the state.
with these class actions if you get $100 after they paid the lawyers you are lucky
He should run for office anyways.
This man is relentless
Don't run for NY office, they always corrupt you look at AOC, anti-war Dems, pro peace folks, balanced budget pol, tea party, contract with America, etc. Etc. Etc. The list is long of the system changing you. You don't change the system.
@@Imthefake A STUPID misconception!!!!!
Every time I think this cant get any worse, it does 10x.
You found out on your own after y e a r s.
And there was noone in NYC who even had an idea they screwed hundreds of people for a decade...insane
Something is rotten in the state of New York.
@@sandgrownun66 Wall Street was the start of NY's rot.
@@Code7Unltd Wall Street is the personification of the economic system the US was built on. So you'd better suck it up.
As a programmer the first thing that comes to mind is that... it's a bug. Someone ran a batch program in production that had a bug in it and it hasn't been cleaned up yet. They may not even be aware of it (or the programmers are hoping no one noticed or missed it themselves), so the first course of action you should take is to point out all this information to them, mentioning especially all of them having the same (similar) start dates and identical amounts. The identical amounts scream programming bug to me.
Thats a big “opps” Guaranteed the money they’ve made/will earn will not go back to the businesses.
@@johnv8762 It's a huge oops, and the blame (should it be true) should fall on the group that created the software. Something wasn't tested properly, someone didn't have the insight to think about "what if" scenarios, it may not even be the fault of the programmers if their specs were off and they coded to spec. It's definitely a mess though.
@@grumpysanta6318 If there's a lawsuit there, then you sue everyone and either let the court decide how liable everyone is or let everyone who is liable decide among themselves how much of the settlement each is responsible for. (Which way you assign liability among the parties depends on the jurisdiction, and I'm neither a lawyer nor a New Yorker, so I have no idea which way they do things in New York courts.) Either way, though, as the plaintiff it's not up to you to assign blame to one entity when there's more than one potentially involved; you just find everyone who _could_ be at fault and convince the court and jury that someone needs to pay for it, and then let someone else determine to what degree everyone involved was at fault and, therefore, how much of the settlement they're responsible for. In this case, I'd guess it's one or more NY state departments, definitely including tax enforcement, and whoever made the software that caused the problem, if it was indeed a bug and not just someone selecting a column or row instead of a single cell in Excel (which, if everyone else's notices also got sent to that PO box in Maine, is probably what actually happened).
looks more like all those businesses had a proxy/temporary account created in the interim, but it wasn't transferring the data real account and was not terminating the old ones. it's funny they all have the same amount of debt on them, which means there was a data overspill. for the accumulation number being too low so overwriting the value is more likely. 1551.52 - is probably the real number of the last one of those businesses updating the value before the bug was mitigated. but nobody cared or was smart enough to go get the operational yield analyzed to fix it too.
that is always what they say when they get caught but pay it i bet they wont contact you to give you a refund
Louis, I recommend contacting the Institute for Justice. If all or most of these people got screwed the same way you did, then I believe that you have grounds for a class action lawsuit, and if the Institute for Justice gets on board then you will not have to sell your business in order to get justice.
Edit: They could also help with the legwork in contacting all those businesses to inquire about weather or not they knew they had warrants issued on them.
Jup. Its totally fair to claim a number in the nine million range for Louis alone. Times 400 would be a 3.600.000.000 dollar lawsuit against NYC. Any lawyer that sees a chance to win that by getting a percentage will jump at this opportunity.
THIS! Looks like it could very well be a solid case for them, and DAMN wouldn't be be awesome to have IJ representing Louis!
Up vote for IJ! Those guys are heros
I would love to see the IJ represent this and I would love to see if a lawsuit actually occur that it get shared to some of the legal UA-cam Channels such as Steve Lehto, The Civil Rights lawyer just to name two. My father watches these channels all the time and it is insane some of the stories they cover on how badly people get screwed over.
IJ are the heroes we desperately need, but don't deserve.
Make sure and take screen grabs (And printouts if possible) of all the information. You know very well that when someone in that office sees this video all that information is going to disappear. That’s exactly what happened with that girl that worked for Yelp and had her friend commit libel against you. When you brought it to Yelp’s attention it immediately disappeared, and if I remember correctly before you took screen grabs so you could sue them and her for it.
The Internet Archive maintains a Way Back Machine to combat this problem.
@@realtijuana5998 It doesn't capture dynamic database searches, though.
Exactly what I was thinking. Hope he didn't post this without grabbing everything.
@@realtijuana5998 Unless you are related to the owner of the site i.e. Taylor Lorenz
Yes he should archive the pages as he pulls the info from searches.
Better screenshot the info before the state finds a way to redact the contact info and such.
A company I worked for received a sales tax due notice from the state for a oddly large amount when we hadn’t sold anything taxable. The state explained that it was an amount they picked to get attention from businesses who hadn’t declared any sales tax for that quarter. There could be thousands of businesses that got a bill for that same amount and many may not have challenged it especially if that notice was sent to the wrong address.
Why is it legal for the government to lie to us?!
I had the same thing with nys sales tax, they just send out bill and hope you pat.
@@billh.1940 sure to get paid by the accountants payable when it has “warrant” on it.
Scummy stuff
@@billh.1940 but if you did that it would be fraud, but it is ok for them. Two different legal systems.
You should check if this situation is liable for a class action lawsuit, then contact all other 399 companies to inform them about what you discovered and if they're interested in joining in. Could they be in the same situation where the mail is getting forward to the same PO Box as yours? That would be the cherry on the cake.
Yeah, I wouldn't waste my time and money suing this alone. If you can make it a class action then the lawyers will line up to work on it for "free" instead of you having to pony up the expenses up front. I know it's the land of the free and the home of the lawyers but is your mental health going to get better by spending the next several years in court fighting a losing battle with your own money?
@@ruukinen Will it get better if you let them step on you over and over again and push you down lower and lower? Just because it may hurt doesn't mean it is the wrong choice, predatory companies rely on your logic.
For you to give an inch because it won't hurt for a mile... only for them to take enough inches for a mile.
Think Louis stirred the nest enough now that NY state crooks got sweaty and purged all mention of the said PO box. Hence he found as much in the last phone call.
@Emil Riikonen Note, damages in this case may include loss of growth and financing valued significantly more than the warrant value.
Also if possible run a query sorting lien amounts by size looking for other clusters of identical amounts. Their software should be doing this automatically to flag possible problems. I'm certain it would be doing so if the extra liens were a problem for the agency generating them.
If you want to sue, keep in mind that attracting more attention can also cause the people behind everything to start covering their tracks. I'd take screenshots of everything before releasing more information on your channel, just in case everything disappears overnight
Very good point!
Yeah if he hires a lawyer, they're going to tell him to keep quiet for this exact reason.
it's almost certainly some kind of scam run by state employees. and you can bet they will start destroying evidence as soon as they find out louis is on to them.
This would be pretty hard to cover tracks on. All of those warrants leave a paper trail which is wide open to discovery.
@@syntaxlost9239 doesn't mean they won't try. criminals are gonna criminal.
Louis, you need to know this. None of those businesses are active anymore. They all were designated to inactive on 08/31/2016, it even shows that at 1:58 in this video. They've all been dissolved, I went through them all. Only a couple still exist but they were revamped as a new corporation, usually with "2" tacked onto the end of the business name.
It's extremely likely that there was some 4 year grace period given for payment of some type, none of them paid it, and were dissolved as a result.
Yes, there was a clerical error with the wrong address on file But what's even more concerning is that somehow your business wasn't dissolved when clearly it "should have been" in their books.
If it's the same as Louis' case, those were temporary licenses for startups. The actual company might still be there.
Also, that list is 400+ companies that have the lien on them as of now. How many companies found out about it one way or another and either paid or got it resolved?
What I think happened there, is that some database task, that gets run every so often, looks for unpaid fees and taxes, triggered that lien process. Nobody checked them for the validity of any of them. And the software didn't take into account that the license numbers were temporary and further taxes would be paid on another, permanent license number.
I wonder if that bug is still there. I do suspect though, that at least "Final Boss" knows about it and very carefully avoided admitting the issue.
As for the others, who would make a reference to a known bug in the NY tax system, on a call that "may be recorded for quality assurance" ?
That is fascinating.
Feels like a shadows form of revenge.
@@peregreena9046 Good points. It's important to hypothesize benign explanations and see if there is evidence for them. All of this though doesn't address how he didn't get any indication of this until years later. Them doing this automatically would have been a minor issue if he'd gotten notification in 2016.
@@gblargg would be nice to find out if those 400+ businesses also had a remote P/O box address, or even the very same.
The business was fine, it was the orphan temporary EIN causing the problem. Yeah, something should have caught the mistake that Louis made.
Thank you for doing this Louis!! You are a real super hero.
This is the kinda "clerical error" that suppresses small businesses ability to function en mass, and also potentially steals thousands of dollars from these people. You see this kinda stuff in a lot of billing companies, where they send a bill twice, do an accidental charge, but it just so happens to thousands of people all at once. Some catch it, some don't, for some it's inconsequential so they don't care. What you should do as of right now is find a way to estimate how much this potentially cost you in losses, even if it's all theoretical. If it prevented you, and others, from getting financed and contributed to closure, or presented any other problem... that could be a large number, and with it happening to many... that could be a massive massive class action suit. I would absolutely take this info to a lawyer and as many of those businesses as possible... and as soon as possible. People who say it's just a whoopsie and it's no big deal are idiots or liars.
Ya, error. Smh
Louis is worth roughly a million now. If he could finance himself in the past 7 years, that would be 10 million easy. 9 million damages times 400 is a whopping 3.600.000.000 lawsuit.
-_-.... the hospital billed my mom for emergency surgery for a surgery planned months ahead (was a knee scope) ... difference in cost / 600 dollars i think at the time versus 10,000...
when my mom noticed the error on her bill and went to address it / the person at the hospital my mom talked to about the billing error just said well your insurance already paid for it so what does it matter?
the company she worked for was self insured... and was an insurance company.... in the end after the company lawyers got involved the surgery was 0$ but yea... bs like this is part of the reason for rising health costs...
a friend of mine worked for a utility company with about 1 million customers. once he made and error and all customers got ~$3 (a different currency) higher bills. there was 1 complaint. ~$3mln more paid this month.
spectrum does this
I am weird and never comment on YT vids but I have been watching your channel since I was 14 and the amount that I have learned from just this channel has literally changed my life and it was through people like you that I learned to not take NO for an answer when an unfair roadblock is in my way and I have been inspired many times through your resilience and willingness to share the good and the bad. I hope that no matter what happens you do you what you think is best but with you at the helm I cannot possibly begin to imagine a better person to fight for, not only yourself, but also those 400 other business owners. Who knows how many more they screwed over like this...
Thank you!
@@EternalResonance Not even kidding when I say it would be a great episode
@@EternalResonance their production staff would never allow them to investigate NYS. that would never happen based upon Home Box Office's parent companies.
Except those other people that got screwed to not have binders full of every last detail.
@@EternalResonance I think you're grossly overestimating the desire of HBO->AT&T->Vanguard to promote Louis, his message that directly clashes with their business models, and distress Oliver's mostly left-leaning audience with tales of gross incompetence and corruption in Democrat-run states.
The question that's burning in my mind is "Were you ever notified, and if not, was there a PO box in Maine on their duplicated record?" The followup question to that is "Is there a corporation that started around Jan '12 that had a PO box in Maine that somehow got duplicated to all these businesses?"
If there is a PO Box in Maine for all of these other companies then it would be evidence of fraud.
And all the half cents are also being redirected there A la Gus Gorman / Richard Pryor 😂
Good question.
That's my question too; but I think that if a PO box in Maine was getting 400 bogus tax letters (or even if 400 PO boxes in Maine were getting them), then the USPS would have reached out to NY state. Or there would be a story in the Maine local newsmedia.
I think the UPS worker he talked to would have mentioned something like "our records don't go back that far, but there is an old legend circulating around the office about hundreds of warrants being served here at once".
There is a simple explanation for this. This day, the state filed warrants against all of the companies that failed to file their first tax forms.
In 2012, the number of new business applications was 2.58 million. Assuming equal distribution amount the states, 51,600 were started in NY. I bet there were actually more in NY.
400 of those failed to file their first tax form.
My god the determination here is insane. I'm so glad that people like you exist Louis. You are not just a nobody on the internet. Remember that.
Probably an echo chamber. 99% of the people Louis calls probably won't want to spend more than 5 minutes of their lives on such a campaign. And that's why New York and similiar cities can continue doing what they're doing.
I have been watching Louis since early days and I am in India 😊
He doesn't know how influential he is. 🙏
Well if this dude is a nobody, he got over a million nobodies following him?!?!?!?!
For what, I haven't a clue. Must be something good I guess like exposing corrupt government. But honestly there are people out there exposing world wide fraud that'll destroy our entire world economy that don't have a tenth the following this guy has.
I don't get why he's so popular? Somebody want to enlighten me?
this man is one of the few people actually fighting
@@bhatkrishnakishorMan, which city do you live in bro 😊😊
I wonder how many of those warrants also had incorrect addressing. I wonder if there's an incentive structure that was taken advantage of for some employee at the DTF. I really feel that you're on to something much bigger than any of us realize.
I wouldn't be surprised if ALL of them had the same incorrect addressing.
It makes you wonder if it was incompetence or maliciousness
@@Tjalve70 or what if they all had the same address as well?
@@3nertia questions for Plato
Yeah...something smells fishy. Could be totally one person's fuck up though. But it does feel very fishy
Louis, you absolutely should pursue this, but not at the cost of your business.
You have over the course of your channels existence introduced us to Farm right to repair stalwarts and an honest realtor in Manhattan. I am sure you find a lion of an attorney who will take this on contingency. My gut feeling is a few paralegals start digging into this and the truth will reveal a lot more.
You understand more than most how difficult it is to be a small business and the oppression that New York bureaucracy causes. Use your position and platform to help those that couldn't fight have a voice.
And if nothing else, crowdfund this. I can eat Ramen for a while to watch New York have to pay up.
Absolutely. Not at the cost of your business, as @MCuervo says.
Why? Because you could win, you could win big and the week after you'd won NY would be pulling the same sort of stunts like nothing had ever happened.
Also, don't forget that there is stuff like Patreon or other platform to ask for support from the community
Yeah, don't let them take away more from you that they already got.
I'm in medicine and it's all a sham. Sell your business and sue. Consult a lawyer first but make a mark. F the BS
It's not a major coincidence that they were started in 2012. From your story we found that they thought you didn't file tax your first year because of the mixup. It's likely that 1551.52 is a generic penalty for a company that failed to file taxes the first year. Because it's the first year they can't estimate the taxes missed. So if the penalty is 1200$ (for example) plus 3 years or so of interest at 351.52$, all of the warrants would have the same fee.
Though it could be a mistake that hit all those businesses. I am just saying the amount makes sense based on the story you were told. I bet most of them also had the issue where they filed on their proper tax ID and not the temporary one. The major error is that they can't tell those numbers are linked. That is worth a lawsuit.
If this is the case, there should be 2011/2013 groups of companies with the same fee pattern (though presumably slightly different number)
@@queazocotal Unless the temporary ID not linking to the proper tax ID issue had been resolved. Tho, to be fair, there seems to be only two dates that this has happened - if you started your business on Jan 18 or Jan 17 in 2012 - so someone messing up the data entry sounds more plausible. Still, messing up the data entry for 400 companies (that make their life as a company a lot harder) is still grounds for lawsuit.
Same thing I was thinking.
I am guessing more of them were founded, abandoned, and never bothered to file than had the same temporary tax ID problem.
Yes it's most likely a mistake, but the fact that they won't take responsibility for it and that "error" damaged all of those businesses from getting credit (and most of those businesses probably don't even know about the tax warrants) it does indeed warrant a lawsuit - a class action suit to be precise.
Like other people have said in the comments, don't sell your business. If you really want to go forth with a lawsuit, then set up a GoFundMe when you know the full extent of the lawsuit costs, and I assure you me and most of your audience will be willing to donate to your cause.
Also, someone mentioned that these businesses are mostly terminated, so I don't know if you could contact them necessarily. Maybe you can contact the business owners and ask them about how the situation went down if you can. However, I'm not an expert nor a business owner, so I wouldn't know what can be achieved from that.
And don't forget to state that you love life and you would never kill yourself. Not even being facetious here, considering what kind of people seem to be involved in all this mess.
You're spot on. $20 to watch it play out will be impossible to turn down for so many. If 3% of his subs chuck in 20 there's more than a million bucks right there.
I'll join with few of my euros. This is the best show I ever seen on YT: a person against asshole bureaucrats.
To see someone fight my home state of ny and how mismanaged it is on a corporate level I would gladly.
@@0mnis14sh I would donate 20 € for this as well
Yeah, the company is something that is actually constructive. You don't sell it, especially after you've already moved to a more competent jurisdiction.
Hi Louis, 350 businesses have 1,558.94 dated 08/02/2016. I have checked a few but they are coming up as being started in December 2011. I think I could find the same for other amounts. Tip of the iceberg?
Could be! I have found it happening on multiple days not just 08/02/2016, so the total number could be insane. But it's 3am so this is for tomorrow unless someone in a better time zone does it first.
Seems only a few months apart. Louis's was Jan 2012? They probably went through every couple weeks and did hundreds to juice revenues? Certainly seems like the tip of the iceberg.
Louis should see this comment and in my opinion also jump on destiny's stream to talk with him and pisco about it and consider a crowdfunded class action lawsuit or something like that ~
@@PhilNEvo He should not go on any political streams. He will alienate half his audience, and his right to repair movement is decidedly bi-partisan. Maybe he can go on Breaking Points, but even then I would be leery of the idea.
@rossmanngroup It's deeper than you thought
The strangest part about all of this is how the warrant got sent to Maine while the actual business address continued receiving everything else. And then, of course, discovery of the Maine address only for Mafia Man to later state that it never existed on file.
Hanlon's razor is something I always try to keep in mind, but at some point there are too many coincidences piling up. I'm not ruling out incompetence just yet, but this whole situation reeks. I agree with the suggestion of starting a GoFundMe for this, because it would be a shame for this to get swept under the rug, even if it was just a screwup.
I bet every single company apart from 1, that has a correspondence address in Maine, has a duplicate account with the correct address.
Training issue, failure to convert temp account to permanent, and creating second permanent when updated ID received.
Or a data merge failure when digitisation of system happened.
I would put good money on a no malice outcome.
No Malice intended does not mean no harm was done.
There's a reason negligence is also considered criminal in some cases, what matters is how issues get resolved once they get to light, regardless of how they occurred.
Sweeping it under the rug claiming "that address never existed on file" when there's proof of the opposite means someone is not taking accountability for a mistake that was made, where their responsibility was to make sure things went right.
Mistakes happen, and should not be punished assuming the person who made the mistake is dilligent enought to rectify it.
I'm ruling out incompetence...
In Stevens Point Wisconsin there is an evil hospital (St Michael's) that "accidentally" sent out a very vague bill to thousands of people for $500. Most people paid it, but several, including my uncle, hadn't been there in ages and started asking questions. We will never know how much money they kept from that scam :/
That's reminiscent of an old scam. The scammers would watch the obituaries and when someone died, send a bill for some small amount for something like plumbing repairs or somesuch. These bills would often get paid because the executors of the estates assumed it was a valid bill.
How much you wanna bet that contacting those 400 businesses will be LESS OF A HASSLE than what you've already been through in dealing with this?
If NYC and NYS were held adequately accountable, even a fraction of the consequences they unload on regular individuals who's lives they don't blink an eye over ruining, for every incidence where NYC did horrible things, there wouldn't be a NYC, period. The City would have been bankrupted and dissolved over a century ago, the state would have been shattered into a bunch of pieces, decades ago.
Obviously. How many people has Wall Street alone managed to ruin?
@@drewt1717 I think this is about the state/city itself, not any business that's in it.
And nothing of value would be lost.
dont get my hopes up talking like that
@@Mernom oh so you're wrong. Money makes political decisions and money comes from business
Right on man, I truly hope you are able to bring this to right against the corrupt bureaucracy of NYC.
Don't sell your business to sue New York. Although you may wish it doesn't ever happen to anybody again, I can guarantee you that it will - and you lost control of your business. And as mad as you may be, and Lord knows I don't blame you, it's really not your problem in particular any more.
What you need to do is embarrass these idiots. And you are doing that just fine. Ideally you should get at them through corporate media as well.
i think part of the reason he may wish to sell is to get rid of ALL that is acociated with nyc and might want to make a new one free from the touch of nyc
I was trying to word a reply and yours pretty much says it better than I could. So yes. What they said.
I like how everyone telling Louis to sell his business meanwhile forgetting if this fails or a judge doesn’t fall into favor with Louis he’s soured his reputation. The silver lining is if Louis wins, he will have money to retire. That’s about it.
yea that would be a big mistake i would like him to sue new york but selling it would ruin his business
@@blank.e5plus then he would have to work his way back up and i dont think hes willing to do that and he wouldnt be able to use the same name ether
Honestly the most horrifying thing about seeing this pattern is the question of "If it happened in this one particular instance/date and time, how many times has it happened before or since?" How many other people got screwed and didn't even know?
Or they knew but didn't have the paperwork from so many years ago to back it up.
yeah this was just one day of 365 lol i doubt it happened just one time, on one day only, ever.
They knew they were being screwed because they were living in new York.
In NYC? All of them.
Chris Flynn already documented following in this discussion: "If you look at the 400+ $1558 Warrants they were all incorporated in 12/2011 and the 400+ $1567 warrants were 11/2011. Eight for $1573.21 were 10/2011, three for $1542.89 were 02/2012 so a few stragglers. Nothing similar happened in Aug 2014/15/17/18 as best I could see."
So it seems that it has happened multiple times and every time the warrant has been close to $1560 but not exactly that.
Go for it, but please don't sell your business.. As if the case goes nowhere, you lose your business and savings and the bullies do win...
Instead do what you doing now to raise awareness and investigate. And hopefully you will find more passionate people of the cause to join you, from the video's it looks like you won't have to look far to get additional help and support to build a case ..
Slowly but eventually you will fight this and win that way!
If only Louis could get all 1.76 million of his subscribers to put a buck into a GoFundMe account...
Thanks for trying so hard to make the world better for all of us :)
Louis, you have an audience here. There are people who are absolutely willing and able to help you out in this stuff simply to help you out. If for nothing else than with grunt work like calling 400 people for you. You have the option of calling in favors from your viewers for things other than money.
Since the Final Boss reacted as if this wasn't the first time he'd dealt with this, I'd suggest finding the pattern beyond the group of businesses that were in that one batch. He fixated on if you had multiple ID numbers, which means he probably hears cases like this enough that this isn't a one off. It could be every time (trigger event) happens everyone sharing (fixed data point here) ends up sharing (multiple data points here) like.... registration dates inheriting mailing address and warrants.
The naysayers might be right: It could be an error. But an error someone keeps around through malice or stupidity is just as bad. Make enough noise to force this source of grief to get fixed, and get whoever didn't care that it's broken *or* wanted it broken put in the spotlight.
I wouldn't be surprised that the 400 Louis is seeing were even more, just by different dates.
If the data could be scraped into a database or whatnot, then afair it's a relatively simple query to group by a couple fields (i.e. date and amount owed) and filter count greater than 1, sort by count descending, etc. That would give you a list telling you if it's a reoccuring pattern and how big the scale is and where to look for the duplicate entries. It might find some false positives but really the odds seem small for legit warrants being the same amount on the same day (for taxes anyway).
@@sigilbaram All internet data can be scraped, there are plenty of tools for that, it just takes a bit of time to create a program with a routine for that. The simpler the website, quicker it is to implement a tool for that.
Even if it is an error, the state government has a moral and fiduciary duty to be accurate and accountable in their enforcement, which gives Louis (and all these other businesses) standing for real damages. For any other entity, it would be an easy case to demonstrate gross negligence and resulting harm. Of course, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the state has carved themselves out an exception for when they fuck up, just like with police.
That money from selling your company can get away from you real quick in a hurry with lawyer fees and whatnot, and you'll likely be in it for multiple years. Not something I'd advise. They WILL find ways to drag this on and on and on until you've exhausted yourself. And we are not just talking about money, these fuckers will chew you up and spit you out until a noose looks like your new best friend. I know someone who had an experience like that, luckily her husband found her before she could do the deed.
See if a class action lawsuit with the other people is possible. Don't be the only guy who's getting shot at, spread the love. But know that you being involved will still mark you as the main target, since you are likely going to be the guy with the biggest public presence of all involved.
And to those here who say he should go ahead and just fucking do it: Gee, it sure is nice to talk a big game when it's not your own livelihood that's on the line.
I agree he should team up and do a class action. He also should set up a fund we can all donate to! I do not think he should be selling his business for this!
@@pepethepatriot7524 a combination of both seems to be the way to go yes.
Wow, this goes deep. It's amazing what you've uncovered so far. This kind of thing should definitely not happen at all, but most certainly not at this scale. This is the state against the people.
You need to get in touch with every one of these guys and do a class action lawsuit against the city of New York. I swear dude, I bet you'll get a huge payday out of this!
You swear? Nobody you know has prospered off your advice, so how can you swear now. This is just a TV show drama to you and I
QI says no
@@gickygackers oh please forgive my exuberance weird random stranger on the internet sniping at comments 🤡
@@gickygackers im 12 and this is deep.
The lawyers will have a huge payout.
Sue them !!!!
The way that guy consistently refused to answer your questions and instead said "Well let's just take a step back" and answered a different question you didn't ask - that's just straight up a standard tactic to deflect and control the conversation.
That guy made my hair stand up on end. Master manipulator.
That's when you go broken record, ie "That wasn't the question I asked. I asked you ______" then keep repeating word for word the exact same question until they either answer, or get mad and hang up."I don't know" isn't good enough. Do your job. Find the answer. I expect you to know things.
Then repeat daily until they either answer you (more than 'i dunno') or they stop taking your calls. Then you find another way to be a gad fly to their nonsense.
@@pamwaldron2566 Unfortunately that's what the guy was doing - broken record of "Well, it's been expunged now...".
Looks like the court played phone tag until they found a psychopath on the payroll that was able to handle the situation by lying to your face and made it seem like you did something wrong.
evil.
YES!!!! Go Super Rossmann. I'll help, with research.
It's ridiculous that this kind of thing can happen and go unpunished because an individual can't afford a lawyer to investigate it.
Wonder who we have to thank for that
I worked on software in the past for county governments, assessors, treasurers, etc. (not for NY but for other states) and to me this looks like a bad data migration / repair. What will often happen is weird things are going on with the accounting of all the records and the government officials will call support for help. Some software developer will try and figure out how to fix whatever the problem is and might run SQL scripts against their database to correct. We would commonly have situations like this where we need to reverse a bunch of transactions and re-create them or create new ones and if you're not careful you can screw it up. Not saying that's 100% the case here but it just feels quite familiar to me. The software developers are often the only ones with a complete understanding of all the rules of collecting tax and making the system work.
And sysadmins can only try to fix an issue if they are informed about its existence. So, some office clerk has to NOTICE there’s an issue, deem it important enough to REPORT it, probably to a superior. And if that superior deems it to be an actual problem, THEN it maybe gets reported to sysadmin. Flawless.
@a s it's Y2k times 1000 :-). Just wait until 2038 when Unix screws up.
It could be, but can you imagine the post office getting 400 letters from New York for 400 businesses, at a PO Box in Main? Can you imagine renting that PO Box and getting all that mail? How could NY not know about it? NY does not care.
Can confirm. I work in pension administration (so lots of town/state govt accounts), so not exactly the same as Tax areas but likely close enough. There are a lot of old systems out there that were cutting edge in the 80s. Systems that are very easy to make a mistake on, and very difficult to find/fix mistakes when they happen. I see it all the time. One sloppy SQL statement or fat-fingered copy-paste error in excel and that it... And these old mainframes don't have the same level of audit control as modern systems.
Couldn't the similar dates also just be a yearly scheduled event. For example, if the flag is active X years after creation, add to warrant event. This to me would explain all the 2012 companies having warrants in 2016. Should look into 2015/2017 if there is a similar event with companies started in 2011/2013 respectively.
I think you should only contact a few of em. If they were also screwed, you should get a lawyer to do the rest. This could potentially be the beginning of a class-action lawsuit, or such, I believe. I'm no legal expert, but I did hear that it might be easier to finance lawyers for this since they make money from the class action as well.
Could also be epic if you end up recruiting some of those business owners to finance a lawsuit, rather than go class action.
Thanks!
Louis, especially now that this video is out there, you should go in and save all of the information you need for an eventual lawsuit in case they decide to take it all down or blacklist your IP
Something is rotten in the state of New York.
@@sandgrownun66 *Everything
it would be very hilarious when NYC blacklists all of Texas. I mean, there is the argument that querrying hundereds of records could act as a denial of service attack. I mean: Louises phone calls are a denial of service attack - by making one phone call and asking one simple question he is burdening the NYC tax and court system in a way it was not designed to handle.
While this may have happened to 400+ people in this instance, the next question should be: are there any more instances of the same 'glitch' getting triggered and doing the same thing to other batches of 300+ other people and companies or was your batch an isolated incident? If it was a bad script, you either were caught in a batch that didn't get cleaned up once the glitch got identified or there may be many more batches out there.
Not isolated, I've read a comment there's another batch in 2016. Quote: "it is not just the 400! on 1st of August 2016 you find 113 companies with the exact same amount!"
Oh programming error… for sure. Is there a means to pull the data off the sight and script it to show the patterns cleanly? I would wager it’s using some unsanitized SQL
@@icefireobsidian7490 Ethical SQL injection.
@@themanhimself3 gotta be careful that cannot be done legally if your not being asked to pen test their servers and have a contract written up to do so. The goal is to grab the data legally not illegal stuff.
@@icefireobsidian7490 Could easily write a script to dig through their DB for other instances of this, but boy-oh-boy am I not touching government data like that.
If you look at the 400+ $1558 Warrants they were all incorporated in 12/2011 and the 400+ $1567 warrants were 11/2011. Eight for $1573.21 were 10/2011, three for $1542.89 were 02/2012 so a few stragglers. Nothing similar happened in Aug 2014/15/17/18 as best I could see.
It seems very interesting that all these "clerical mistakes" have so closely similar sums. Makes you wonder if this amount goes just below some legal limit where it often goes under the radar, which would suggest this has been intentional.
@@MikkoRantalainen Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
The similar values all seem to correspond to a computer attributing a start value then calculating by time.
This seems like a training issue, whom ever set up the proper accounts was unaware that they had to remove the temporaries, and then person setting up the temporaries copy pasted an address they had previously assuming the address would be correctly updated when temporary had been changed into a permanent.
I bet a search of the correspondence address in Maine would pull up all the companies involved, and every single one would have a duplicate account with a correct address.
This is huge, there’s no way this is some random thing, absolutely either a clerical screw up, or something more targeted. Absolutely follow this through BUT DONT SELL YOUR BUSINESS
Louis, if you're seriously considering legal action, be very careful what you say in these videos, maybe even consider deleting or editing and re-uploading some of them. Defense council will watch all this and twist your words and use ANYTHING they can to diminish your case. BIG ALOHA from Seattle!
sure - but there are 400 business, not all of them make youtube videos.
Ahh yes Seattle the little known 9th Hawaiian island.
And then you say play the full video not a snipped of the to take some wan out of context what is this TV stop lying
I left a comment on the first video about this saying I'd like to hear what a lawyer has to say. Now that we know over 400 people are very likely in the same boat I think it's necessary to speak with a lawyer. The fact that the Burwick P.O box was completely redacted from the record so quickly is more than a red flag, it's a damn signal flare. I'm concerned that poking around for answers caused them to delete details from the other people's files too. If there's a reputable New York lawyer on UA-cam that would be willing and able to help that would be great. That way we all can be kept in the loop, as much as is allowed of course.
Sounds like a test file got dropped into the wrong environment during a systems test. Or possibly someone was hand editing the database with an update query, and accidentally submitted the query before all of the criteria for the where clause were written. If this person had auto-commit turned on, then they couldn't roll-back the change.
Sharp analysis ;)
You're creating a whole conspiracy theory when the simpler assumption would be a dirty shakedown.
The last part makes a lot of sense. Especially with mail getting sent to a PO box Louis doesn't know anything about. The same update may have inserted that address on every one of those warrants.
@@kalashnikov1343 you underestimate how bad NYC infrastructure is, physical or digital 😂😂😂
@@thealienknight Test files should be though benign.
Not dump an actual legal related issue. this whole ordeal at this point could fall under a really complex head spinning defamation lawsuit. Under the pretense of the potiential damages this "test" could have had. This "test" could be grounds to argue that Louis and all the other falsely charged parties should be credited for the false crime claims. If Louis and others choose to pesue this this could throw everything that NYC claims as lawful current or past claims of wrongful incidents in question. This is a massive can of worms that I wouldn't be surprised if NYC and NYS would be DESPERATE to pay up hush money ASAP. Watch a third of the current what 100 million or billion dollar funding that NYC had planned suddenly dissapear. Over trying to keep their current credibility. As if this gets out it could be the perfect evidence why like president Trump can throw out NYC's tax fraud claims.
"Your honor the state of NY has been falsely trying to expedite money from other state company owners as such I have reason to believe all charges being pressed against me are also falsely created in the hopes that I and many other buisness owners wouldn't notice. As such we believe that ANY and all state related tax claims by NYS should get thrown out."
Might also be worth reaching out to the Institute for Justice to see if they would be interested in helping make this case happen
The worst part about this is that the Rossman side of the lawsuit will have finite resources while the New York side of the lawsuit will have nearly unlimited resources to defend itself at taxpayer expense and the people who made the mistake will never pay a single cent.
I have a sneaking suspicion it probably did happen like you thought, and the notifications were sent to all 400 businesses at that PO Box in Maine and it did belong to one of the businesses on the list but someone applied one person's tax bill to everyone.
I was about to suggest the same thing regarding the P.O. Box in Maine. I think that's exactly what happened.
But the postmaster would have remembered hundreds of letters from NY coming to one box...
@@t0raneko if they have actually sent that mail ... I don't think they ever sent mail to that po box
they accidentally clicked autofill on excel
Hey Louis! If you get written statements, or just a list of signatures of some of them who are in that group, a judge can dismiss them all in one fail swoop! I got a parking ticket along with like 50 neighbors, in just the few blocks I walked to see how many there were, because the city of Chicago failed to put up "No parking for street cleaning (with date and time)" signs as they are required to do. When I told that to the judge, she said if I type up the scenario, and get only 20 signatures of neighbors it also happened to, she would dismiss them all and not just those 20, but all issued on that day and area the cleaning was scheduled for. I did just that, and she kept her promise, and boy did my neighbors treat me to some good food n' drink that summer!
I do not think that you can remove a lien so easily. And Loise wants damages, or at least admission of fault.
the judge did the city a favor. that is illegal and if you guys had the means and managed to catch some press it might have cost the city a pretty penny just dealing with the lawsuit. if it was just you she probably would have forced you to pay and no one would have cared even if you had proof that the city was in the wrong.
@@sarowie If they were made in error, and a proper authority sees and realizes it, it's their duty to dismiss them all, and not really a choice. A court is higher than a city or county department and at least in theory is supposed to be unbiased. I never would have believed it until I did it, and it worked. Every case can of course be different, but to rule it out on a whim would be foolish. One should always try to seek true justice, because chances are you may get it.
I think Louis is more interested in admission of fault, and not damages.
Yes, sue the F out of them for f'ing up your credit for five years!
Louis, I think holding the bureaucracy to account is a noble pursuit, but not if it's at the expense of your financial independence. I think I can speak for many of us when I say that the reason I like you as a youtuber so much is because of how candid you can be since UA-cam is just a hobby for you and if the channel were deleted tomorrow you would still have your business. If the financial independence that being a business owner affords you is what allows you to fight for right to repair and everything else I think that's more important. Not to say that this isn't important but it's more important to not miss the forest for the trees. If winning this fight means giving up on all the rest I think it's a bad decision. I could be entirely misunderstanding the situation but that's my two cents as I understand it.
You should use a web scraper (if possible) to compile that list of business, warrant status and first filing date. Might make it easier to see how many people it happened to and to contact them
Might be against the website's policy
@@NicholayN Policy really doesn’t matter.
@@NicholayN scraping public information can't be illegal
I am no lawyer tho, so take it with a grain of salt
And actually if there is this "coincidence" of more than 500 companies created in January 2012 getting warrants for the same amount in August 2016, there may be other "coincidences" just like this with other warrants of differing amounts. You my man, may have just found a HUGE issue!
These other businesses were not getting "screwed" by the state, they had genuine reason to be fined, likely for not filing certain forms. That's evident by every single one of them being designated as an inactive business on 08/31/2016. The fluke is that somehow Louis' business fell through the cracks and was not shut down.
Fully support you Brother! I hope it does not come to a nuclear option! I’ll stay tune and I hope I can help down the line. Cheers and say hi to Mr. Clinton for me
As someone who knows a thing or two about government software, particularly court software, I want to mention a couple things:
First, it is fairly common for many types of notices and documents to be processed in batches. So, the fact that all of these records showed up at an almost identical time in the electronic system isn't all that strange. There are a whole lot of records that are not produced in real time, and only get fully processed on a set schedule, or when an employee runs a particular process. They might sit in a basket for days or weeks, and then all get run on Tuesday nights or something like that. You would need to look at data for other dates to see if this one date was an anomaly, or if it is common for a whole bunch of liens to get processed at once.
Second, the amount due being identical looks odd to me. When you produce a bunch of records that all have the same dollar amounts like that it is usually because that amount is a flat fee or fine. If that amount was supposed to represent the back taxes you owed plus any fees and fines, it would be highly unusual for so many lien records to have an identical amount due on them. That data looks more like what you would see if you were processing out a bunch of parking tickets or something like that where there is one extremely common fee that all the accounts are being charged. I don't know enough about how that lien amount is supposed to be calculated, but that many identical numbers tingles my spidey senses.
Third, in my personal experience the problem you will likely run into with pursuing this isn't that you can't or won't win. Its that you aren't going to be able to get much in the way of damages to make it worth the effort. To put it bluntly, Courts make mistakes all the time, and in general when those mistakes are discovered they aren't required to do much more than fix the original mistake. So, if they charged you money you didn't owe, and you paid, you could get your money back, probably with interest, but that is it. If the lien is erroneous, you can get it removed. If they screwed up a whole bunch of liens, they may have to go back and review all liens made during a certain period of time. What you aren't likely to get are damages for how a lien might have affected your ability to do business, or to see someone get thrown in jail. You probably won't even see anyone get fired, assuming the person who made the error is even still working there. You would likely need to prove that someone did this on purpose with the intent to hurt everyone who had a bad lien placed on their business before you had a shot at more than just getting the error fixed. So, if you can't get them to fix the lien any other way, sue away, but if you are hoping for more, I think you will be disappointed.
As much as, in Louis's position, I would want to make someone pay, this is probably the unfortunate truth. Courts might not be the best way to go about it. Media coverage is probably the only way to get anything satisfying.
@@dysjectamembra5322 problem is legally they may be insulated in several different ways. That's why I suggested trying media coverage. The more information and the wider spread the better.
You are right, it's going to be very difficult to get much in court. Because (if I understand correctly) he would have to prove in court that this was either maliciously done, or because of recklessness. Additionally, he would need to prove that he incurred damages because of the maliciously/recklessly issued warrant. This would easily cost hundreds of thousands in legal cost. A feasible way would be to get the support of the Institute for Justice or a similar organisation. It's unlikely any law firm would take this case as a contingency case unless they think they could do a class action lawsuit. And that will be difficult because most likely many of these 415 business are not around anymore or have no interest in taking part in legal action.
So I think going the route with making people aware of this is probably the most effective. Maybe start contacting journalists and try to get the story out to the general public.
@@myname7021 Considering the error resulted in a failure to provide service of process which was rectified in a series of phone calls, that he monetized no less, not only was there no harm (since ineffective service of process is fatal to any legal action) but he actually gained from the error.
Without damages there is no standing for a case.
If there was a person behind this rather than some accident, i.e. trough temporarily editing a script. It should be looked at to see if he/she might have had mallice in hurting a single person or business and hiding it through this mass "error".
Proving that might be hard, but might get (more) damages if true. And with the large amount of cases the chance of some connection (including trough family and friends) might well exist.
The other thing worth considering Louis, even if a lawyer wont take the case on contingency, if those other companies are in the same boat as you, would any of them be willing to split costs of legal representation? That would make it a lot more cost affordable no?
Edit, since another thought occured to me:
Using the youtube platform and networking possibilities it gives, I wonder if it might also be worth reaching out to LegalEagle. He's a lawyer himself, and talks all things law on his channel. He probably wont just hop in and sue New York for you, but he might be willing to do a video collab or something discussing where you might stand from a legal perspective and what you're options might be with you.
I don't know, he may not be interested, but if you don't ask you'll never know.
Louis is the only one who got screwed here, every other business on that list was shut down on 08/31/2016, likely for actually not filing (unlike Louis). For some reason Louis' business was not shut down, who knows why
I doubt LegalEagle would collab on something like this, but you never know. More likely to be on this lesser known law channels like @NateTheLayer @RekietaLaw @GoodLawgic @VivaFrei
Louis should contact them, maybe they are interested to talk about this and give him their expert opinion on how feasible a lawsuit would be and what his options are.
@@myname7021 Yeah, certainly worth reaching out to any and all, the worst that can be said is no.
@@TowerCrisis Hmmm. Interesting. Although, are you sure they were legitimately shut down, and it wasn't part of the screw up? I mean, it seems waaaaaaaaay too coincidental that they'd all have been pulled up on the same day, for the exact same amount down to the cent, and then all be shut down on the same day too...
Lawsuits cost money. You might see if you can interest a non-profit like institute for justice...
If that doesn't work you might see if you can get some predatory class action law firm to take this up you're obviously not the only one.
A class action would be handled based on the amount of money the attorney could make. Basically the people agree to the suit and the state of NY would settle and the problem would simply disappear. Nobody but the lawyer is going to take in any money greater than the imposed fine.
Don’t hire a NY attorney . They will rip you off
I wonder if there is a law firm on that list.
@@webreakforsquirrel4201 No to settlements.
As you can see this is borderline holy war for Louis Rossmann. Meaning the evil guys must be held accountable and never repeat it.
This can be achieved only through an official court order and not a settlement.
As it becomes a precedent and other victims can use it to punish future aggression from NY, and potentially in other states.
IJ does GREAT WORK!!!
We need more people like you in this world Louis! Keep up the good work!
Louis, I would record the info for those 400 businesses asap. Just in case they all disappear from the warrant search all of a sudden.
Wouldn't it be ironic that all of those also had PO box 842 as mailing address for the warrant?
In the other video the guy on the phone pretty much said it was an automated system so 400 warrants in a day for a city like NYC is not entirety impossible when you consider the sheer numbers of businesses there, especially in 2016, from the large stock market brokers to the street corner hot dog vendor but the fact they all share the same time of beginning operation, same date of filing, same amount, that's suspect.
The UPS worker he talked to would have remembered something about 400 warrants being received at once.
Louis, you should totally start a class action law suit. But most importantly, please be safe. We love you and we'd hate to lose you
Individual can't start class actions suits.
@@yekutielbenheshel354 there’s 400 easy to locate people. Pretty sure plenty of lawyers would jump on this.
@@spacemanmat Shoot, I'd call some of these businesses if it means fixing this.
Go get them you are absolutely right they need to be exposed. How many time had they done it before and sense.
I would seriously consider contacting the NY auditor or comptroller.
I'm from Canada and normally we have an auditor general which investigates issues like these.
I love watching the evolution of this situation. It's not just about you anymore, it's about a whole helluva lot more. Don't sell your business over it, but do consider finding these people and put together a class action suit.
Don’t destroy your finances (and life) suing them as that goes nowhere, just keep exposing them publicly, spread the information far and wide, this is great! I think there can be some excellent opportunities for your fans to help with organizing all this information and stuff too
Spreading information by itself doesn't fix this: it pacifies those who share.
Considering that all of these 400+ companies have similar creation dates and the same warrant date, it seems likely to me that this was caused by 1 person, either making a really big mistake, or committing an act of maliciousness before leaving their job. There's a lot of ways that many records could have the same problem. If they process anything through spreadsheets, you could easily get columns misaligned. If they run manual queries on an SQL database, a small mistake in your WHERE clause (or the lack of one) can affect many more records than intended. There may have even been a software bug that existed for that brief window of time before getting patched. I think it's a little disingenuous to claim that it is a systemic problem from just these 400+ warrants. It's been over 10 years since 2012, whoever was responsible might have a different job by now. It would be nice to know what actually happened, but it may be unrealistic to expect to get an answer.
I was thinking that was probably someone who was being replaced or let go and they decided to fuck a bunch of people over.
The systemic problems are from the lack of empathy that officials have when you point out problems and ask for help. Incompetence mixed with apathy is indiscernible from maliciousness.
I'm in the UK so my experience doesn't mean much but when people try to hold public organisations to account here they have multiple layers of ways to duck responsibility. They will claim admin error, system error, individual employee error, they will pay a small fine and an internal investigation will rumble on for years and then they will say "lessons have been learned" but 5 years later the same thing is still happening or that everyone involved has now left or retired or they will have some loophole backdoor small print that allows them to do the activity with impunity. I wish you the very best and will support you all the way but my gut tells me a lawsuit will not achieve much.
How about if you can find multiple dates where they did the same thing for multiple other companies? At some point it must be considered systematic and responsibility must be taken.
@@MikkoRantalainen I totally agree with you. Their response would probably be something like "we process a large number of cases every year and a small percentage of errors are within acceptable tolerance" or "clearly there was a training issue and we will look at our policies and procedures to make sure lessons have been learned"
Case in point where a computer programming error resulted the Royal Mail charging, convicting fining and jailing a number of postmasters for imbezzelment (?). I doubt if any of them were ever compensated.
Yeah remember when mr beazt tweeted that he was annoyed at youtuw for allowing his face of those "everyone who visits this site will get x" amount of money then UA-cam responded with will fix it? Yeah those scam ads are still around and I doubt youtibe will fix it anytime soon, I think Mr beast should sue to get the message across that we won't stand for that crap
I’d imagine it’ll be similar to a police department when a cop does something he isn’t supposed to. In where they say something along the lines of “the police department did an internal investigation and nothing is wrong,” or “we suspended/fired the involved people.” But if you look closer, it’ll be a something like a 30 day PAID suspension or on the off chance they are “fired,” they another police department ends up hiring them the day after.
This is absolutely disgusting! I REALLY hope you push this as far as you can! Definitely call the other business owners and hopefully you can come up with a way to start a law suit. I guarantee this has happened before and will happen again. Dont let them get away with this! Your channel is awesome!
Is there any possible legal explanation for that exact amount? Like is that the amount of a specific obscure fine? Or is this just blatant dirty cash grab?
This is supposed to be "unpaid taxes" nothing to do with fines so unless they made the exact same amount of money in the years it's literally impossible
@@DumbArse Missed tax report. Could easily have a fine for the act or missing to file in your report and not for the missed taxes. Its quite literally possible.
Definitely possible it's the standard fine amount for failing to pay taxes.
@@DumbArse Probably a standardised amount for unknown taxes. "You didn't do your taxes, so we put 1500 on". Getting confirmation on that would probably be impossible through based on what he's gone through so far. Also ties in that they are business of the same age (1st tax year?). Most of those liens are probably correctly applied, and some will be clerical errors like Louis'.
There is rarely maliciousness behind these things, just incompetence coupled with no accountability. The biggest thing exposed here is complete clusterfuck of trying to fix THEIR mistake.
@@DumbArse Yeah, I just remember the evil guy said something like "other people can use the tax department for a warrant" or something. Just a thought.
I think it's probably malicious, or an error they are trying to hide
ABSOLUTELY SUE. Government is not immune to consequences and should be held accountable just as we the people are.
Just setup a GoFundMe and we will make sure you can sue them lol
Bingo. If all 1.76 million of us donates one George Washington, we have at least one snowball's chance in hell to see these people fried.
GiveSendGo or other alternate would be better, GoFundMe would probably shut the campaign down.
I totally understand your frustration and they should 100% be held accountable. I think contacting the other businesses to get in on this is very smart. However you should not let your own business go down over this. If you were to lose your business to fight the New York state where you will probably at most slightly inconvenience them is actually letting them win.
None of those businesses exist anymore, they all ceased operations in 2016.
It's still not worth selling his business and fucking up his _and_ his employees' livelihoods over it though.
Louis, have you checked to see if there are other similar patterns? It wouldn't surprise me if you found other large sets of warrants all with identical amounts, though different than your amount.
Did a quick search myself. On 08/23/2016, there are over 600 issued for the exact amount of 1,550.00.
this is what I wanted to ask as well. They gotta be doing this every now and then. There's probably multiple thousands affected.
Thank God for you Louis.
You should definitely not sell your company! Not only because you will lose what you worked for all these years, but also because if you remain the boss of your company, you should have more leverage if it comes to a lawsuit.
Rather get together with the other companies and pitch together, maybe do a class action lawsuit.
Also you should create a crowdfunding campaign for that, I bet a lot of people will donate for this! I will!
You should get a copy of those businesses and the data off the site before it "magically disappears" !
If they did this to 400 people, there is no way they wouldn't know. There must have been someone that already had financing. At that point the bank will have been asking if there were problems. Try to find someone that had this fixed years ago.
And yes! Take this to court!
The path of revenge like this can be very self-destructive, Louis. Be careful. Don't go down that path if it costs you your business. Do it only if it's relatively easy for you and doesn't cost you so much.
I appreciate all the content you've made over the years, I just want to put a word in that I don't want to see you ruin yourself or your future over revenge. You're already out of the state, don't throw yourself back in to a toxic relationship if you can help it. I'd love to see you come out of this, proving that you're far better and more successful in Texas than you ever could be in NYC.
Yes. It's time to finish moving on.
Definitely report this to someone- state legislator or whatever. Honestly, im glad your going in on this one!
I think the problem is that there aren't any people in the NY govt willing to listen and/or able to do anything about it.
Class action law firm
Remember that journalist who selected view source code and informed the city about their leaked data? And almost got arrested by the mayor for hacking?
@@rwdplz1 institude of justice?
Don't sell your business. If you're determined to sue them another means will come about. You've got some good karma coming your way, and lots people behind you, and your causes. I'd try to contact some people on that list (if possible) and if they got screwed somehow too, then maybe some of you could pool your resources and hire attorneys together. Just a possible idea. Good Luck, Louis!
A class action suit.
It'll be interesting to see if one of them has a PO Box in Maine. And if that's the only one that owed taxes.
It could be interesting to call back the nice lady who told you about the PO Box in Maine if she can pull up those warrants and see if they all have that fake address. (no need for security access on your side. Just asking her to open them up and look). Maybe tell you if what she sees troubles her.
I think this may actually be a big scam. I have a feeling refund checks were being sent out and ending up in that PO Box.
@@chaos.corner yeah I was thinking someone was fudging numbers to make a withdrawal from tax payers by creating dummy liens to keep the books balanced while they syphon legit repayments off and keep the dummy lien in its place so $1,000,000+ is sneaked out the back door and on paper nothing is "missing" just a whole bunch of non payers who don't have the ability to raise any red flags as all the mail was sent to a dummy address, with the speed of bureaucrats they probably knew it would be a decade before anyone ever found any proof and everyone else in power are just as slimy and corrupt and would be compelled to brush it under the rug to avoid kicking up the muck and potentially exposing some shit they are involved in
Louis you could try reaching out to some journalists. They usually have the means to reach out to many people, and they might help you out finding a solicitor that will take the case without upfront pay.
I'd be interested to see if they were all sent to PO boxes in Maine.
This is great work! Yes make direct contact with those businesses. There is someone with tons of money and bored! Hope they toss you a bunch of cash!