Class warfare: Exotic car owners in MA got massive tax break

Owning a high-end car? Fun. Paying the hefty vehicle tax on it? Not so much -- that is, unless you live in the state of Massachusetts. From the late 1990s to 2007, the state's Registry of Motor Vehicles missed collecting $32 million a year in annual taxes because it used the NADA database to calculate them for some 131,000 exotics or otherwise premium vehicles. Unfortunately for the RMV, NADA's database excludes high-end luxury vehicles, so there was no proper way to tax those cars in the state. If, for instance, you purchased a Bugatti Veyron, instead of paying many thousands of dollars, you could have wound up paying no more than the owner of a Ford Focus.

This is going to suck for owners of affected cars, as the taxman comes to collect what he missed the first time around, right? Wrong. Folks who purchased an affected vehicle through 2007 are completely off the hook. The commonwealth has decided that trying to collect the over $300 million it missed over all those years would be an administrative and legal nightmare. That's a win-win situation for premium car owners in Mass. that's sure to torque off the regular guy, whom the government had no trouble finding and collecting from, as usual. What's scandalous is that no one at the RMV figured this out until now. Bay Staters, that's you're local government (and those tax dollars it collects) at work.