Maryland’s push to move every tax filing and payment online is leaving St. Mary’s County’s Amish and Mennonite families with inflated bills they have no practical way to fix, a Leonardtown Town Council member said this week.
Councilmember Mary Maday Slade described the problem during council reports at the Oct. 13 meeting. Families in the county’s Plain communities, who largely do not use computers, phones or the internet, used to get paper vouchers in the mail to send in sales tax and other payments, she said. Those vouchers have stopped coming. With no voucher and no way to print one, payments go unmade, and the state then sends an estimated bill.
Those estimates can run $4,000 or $16,000 when the person owes about $400, she said, and the balances carry interest.
No phone, no ID, no way in
Fixing the bills is its own obstacle, Maday Slade said. Many Plain residents cannot reach anyone by phone. Many do not drive, so they must pay someone to take them to Annapolis, and once there, they are turned away at the door because they do not carry photo identification. In some cases, she said, she has driven up herself to handle their business.
State Sen. Jack Bailey, who represents St. Mary’s County, set up a meeting a few weeks ago between the Comptroller’s Office and members of the Plain community, she said. About 100 people attended.
At that meeting, the Comptroller’s Office offered a direct contact, a young staff member who told residents they could reach him anytime by leaving a message and he would call back, Maday Slade said. Bailey pointed out that this was the problem: residents without phones cannot take a return call.
“I don’t know that we made a whole lot of headway,” she said, though the meeting opened communication on what she called a big problem for the community.
A new system, a long wait
The complaints follow the state’s switch to Maryland Tax Connect, the online portal that replaced the Comptroller’s three-decade-old tax systems. Individual filers moved to the new system Sept. 1 after a shutdown in late August to transfer more than 4 billion records. Businesses had already been using it since 2024.
Maday Slade said the upgrade has not gone smoothly for anyone. Taxpayers with problems now face about a 20-week wait for a response from the state, she said. “It’s not just you. It’s everybody.”
Comptroller Brooke Lierman said when individual filing launched that “no system is ever perfect” and that her office wants to keep improving, Route Fifty reported. The office has not publicly addressed the concerns raised at the Plain community meeting.
Taxpayers can reach the Comptroller’s Office at 1-800-MDTAXES (1-800-638-2937). Marylanders who received an extension on their 2025 income tax returns face a filing deadline of midnight Thursday, Oct. 15.
