Amish in Maryland Are Getting $16,000 Tax Bills — When They Owe $400

Rear view of an Amish buggy with a slow-moving vehicle triangle on a road in St. Mary's County, Maryland — Amish families in St. Mary’s County, Maryland have been getting hit with incredibly exaggerated tax bills since the state moved tax filing online.

Plain People in Maryland are getting stopped in their tracks by a tech roadblock when trying to pay their taxes. And it’s causing them some real headaches – and expense.

Amish and Mennonite families in St. Mary’s County, Maryland are receiving estimated state tax bills as high as $16,000 when they owe around $400 — the result of the state’s move to online-only tax filing, according to a local town council member.

The Southern Maryland Chronicle reports that Councilmember Mary Maday Slade raised the issue at the council’s October 13 meeting:

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.

Just how does the state come up with an “estimate” 10 to 40 times larger than the reality? If you’re scratching your head right now, that makes two of us.

The St. Mary’s County settlement is the largest Amish community in Maryland. The state doesn’t have a huge Amish population, but that community is home to around 1,450 Amish people. Add in the remaining 500 or so people in the state’s other settlements and you are talking about potentially hundreds of households.

An Amish-owned food stand in Cecil County, Maryland, one of several other Amish-settled areas in the state.

The St. Mary’s County area also has a significant Old Order Mennonite community, who would have a similar approach, and there are others in the state as well, which might add another 100+ households of people affected here.

Fixing the Bills Means a Trip to Annapolis

Correcting an estimated bill is its own problem, according to Maday Slade. Many Plain residents have no way to reach the Comptroller’s Office 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.

That’s about a 60 mile trip one way from Mechanicsville, a town in the area of this settlement. So they’re looking at potentially a couple hundred dollars for the journey alone.

Add to that the fact they’re not even let in the building because they don’t have photo ID? This is a mess that needs sorting out.

Many Amish don’t have photo ID because they generally don’t pose for photography, which for some I think derives more from custom and tradition, while others will cite a Biblical prohibition on graven images. Either way, they’re not even allowed access to try to handle this snafu after having to go all the way to the state capital to begin with.

A Third Problem

So what has been done to address this? It doesn’t sound like a lot of progress has been made.

State Senator Jack Bailey, who represents St. Mary’s County, arranged a meeting a few weeks ago between the Comptroller’s Office and members of the Plain community. About 100 people attended, Maday Slade said.

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.

So this gives us a total of three tech or cultural issues the Amish are up against here: 1) no internet to pay the taxes, 2) no photo ID to be able to handle it in person, and 3) (at least some of them) no easily accessible phone to be contacted.

Some Amish do maintain phone lines in small buildings known as phone shanties.

“I don’t know that we made a whole lot of headway,” Maday Slade said, adding that the meeting did open communication on the issue.

This isn’t the first time Amish ways have created issues when they don’t mesh with civic and legal requirements. We have seen more of this as technology has advanced.

If you’ve ever been in a restaurant with menus only accessible by scanning a QR code on your phone (during and since the COVID era, they exist), you can see where an Amish customer might run into challenges in that type of situation.

However, most Amish people probably aren’t regularly eating at such places, and even less so five years after the pandemic, though pretty much all of them are having to pay their taxes.

Maryland’s New Tax System Rollout

Unsurprisingly, a new tech system rollout has led these Amish taxpayers into the current conundrum.

The complaints follow the state’s switch to “Maryland Tax Connect,” the online portal that replaced the Comptroller’s decades-old tax systems. Businesses have used the new system since 2024, but individual filers moved to the new system on September 1.

Updates like these usually cause disruption to a set of users even if the net outcome is arguably positive. Often that disruption is limited to confusion on how to use a new system, or a simple dislike of the new “improved” user experience. This case of the Amish represents a more extreme example of such negatives, albeit affecting a very limited group in the state.

However, getting things resolved in a timely manner does not seem promising for anyone with tax-related issues in Maryland. According to Maday Slade, taxpayers with problems now face a wait of about 20 weeks for a response from the state. “It’s not just you. It’s everybody,” she said.

That wait time is nuts, of course, but not exactly shocking if you’ve ever had to deal with issues like this.

When individual filing launched, Comptroller Brooke Lierman said that “no system is ever perfect” and that her office intends to keep improving it, according to a report in Route Fifty.

The Comptroller’s Office has not publicly addressed the concerns raised at the Plain community meeting. I wish them luck in getting this sorted out, hopefully before the next tax year kicks off.