My wife got a series of letters from some law firm trying to collect state taxes owed. They wanted something like $500 because of a ~$10 tax they claimed was owed by my wife's corporation.

Problem was, the corporation no longer existed. My wife was an optometrist who owned her own practice. When she became disabled, we had no way to continue, so we had to close it down and sell everything to pay off it's debts. We ended up spending a bit of our own money ("investing" in a dead corporation), so my wife didn't feel dishonest about how she left things. That wasn't a financially sound choice, but I understood how she felt.

It had shut down a couple years before the tax liability. They claimed taxes were owed on business that occured after the corporation had shut down. Not sure how that's possible, other than a scam.

However, even if it was possible to owe taxes on sales that didn't happen, it would have been the corporation that owed the taxes, and the corporation didn't have any assets.

The lawyer wanted her to file some paperwork with them so that they would know the claim was invalid. She told them no. It required far less effort for us and far more for them for us to just ignore them. If they didn't want to waste their time and money pursuing an invalid claim, they could fix it themselves. They kept trying for a few years, but gave up eventually.

One of only two times when we were able to use the corporate shield to tell some shithead to pound sand.