“There’s little they can do if you sell your house, leave, and never return.”
“This mostly involves people who try to fake their residency.”
I worked for nearly 15 years as a CPA doing taxes in NYC and NJ. NYS and NYC were VERY aggressive, even 20+ years ago, in asserting that someone who had left was still a resident. You are dealing with wealthy people, and they will listen to their accountants and tax lawyers if it will save them substantial money. No legit CPA or tax attorney is going to tell them to fake it - they know that there could, or even likely will, be an examination, and will give the proper advice.
I remember working on several Estate Tax cases against NYS. The deceased in all of these cases had long since moved out of NY (mainly to Florida because it is 2 1/2 hours by plane and has very low taxes), but when they died they were buried in their family plot in NY. Boom...NY then asserts that someone who hadn’t lived in the state for 10 or 20 years had not intended to leave, because they were going to be (get this) residents forever. I $hit you not, that was actually their position. Well, even a liberal, state-worshipping, judge couldn’t buy that, so the state lost every time...but they made our clients spend many thousands of dollars to defend a completely bogus claim...and, simultaneously, do it with a family that was still grieving over the loss of a loved one. The f’ing scumbags.
This is, BTW, similar in nature to the dozens of bogus assessments that I was tasked to deal with from NYC. They would send a notice to a taxpayer, saying that they owed $89, or $147, or as much as $250. Which they did NOT owe - not in one single case. However, the people at the top of the NYC Dept of Revenue who decided to issue these notices (apparently several tens of thousands of them) knew that for a CPA or a lawyer to fight them would cost the taxpayers somewhere between $500 and $1,000, and thus anyone with any sense would just write the check. Well, most probably did (I’d call that outright fraud and/or extortion), but some fought it out of principle (and, at least for our clients, they won).
That’s what tax authorities do.
Decades ago I was given a BS parking ticket in Newark NJ for an expired meter (it wasn’t even close to expired); I haven’t parked my car on the street there since. Their loss; my money goes elsewhere.
A cop in a real town explained to me that they issue them assuming you’d rather pay than miss a day of work fighting it - especially since you couldn’t prove anything at all about the meter.
These sh!tholes are having a hard time coming to terms with “life without white people”.