A US man was in for the shock of a lifetime when he opened a bill from the state of Pennsylvania for $52 billion ($US32 billion).
“I knew it was an obvious blunder. I don’t even make over $100,000 a year, so there’s no way I could owe anywhere near that,” Barry Tangert told News 8.
The Lancaster County resident said the mystifying letter was one of two items that arrived in the mail last weekend, the New York Post reports.
He opened the first to find a refund check from the federal government for over $900.
Tangert’s high was quickly shattered when he opened the income billing notice from the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue claiming that he owed a jaw-dropping $52,950,744,735.28 ($US34,576,826,561.47).
The total was so large it didn’t even fit on a single line on the document.
Tangert immediately knew it was a mistake — the astonishing number is more than triple the $11 billion America’s richest man Elon Musk says he owed the government in 2022.
How the error made it all the way to his doorstep is still a mystery to Tangert.
“I don’t know if it was a computer glitch in the transmission or if it was an input error from my tax preparer,” Tangert said, noting that his tax preparer filed an amendment after noticing an error on his 2022 return.
He reached out to the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue’s customer service line, which also provided little help to the baffled man.
“The first thing he said was, ‘You had a good year.’ And I said, ‘I wish,’” Tangert said.
Fortunately, the state department has since resolved the issue, which it chalked up to wrong numbers simply being put into the system.
Tangert’s case was an isolated incident, the revenue department told News 8.
This article originally appeared in the New York Post and has been republished with permission.
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