In 2020, John Galbreath, a Reisterstown patent lawyer, got a notice from the state that it planned to take $851.76 of any future state tax refund to settle a debt he owed.

The state said he owed money to the Motor Vehicles Administration for an insurance lapse on a car his daughter once used. The catch: The ‘94 Honda was totaled and in a junkyard before then.

If hell hath no fury like a semi-retired attorney with a cause, the ensuing fight with the state’s Central Collection Unit, or CCU, transformed Galbreath into a modern-day Don Quixote tilting at Maryland government debt collectors.

The case has involved several lawsuits, a protracted Public Information Act fight and even an attempted protective order against Galbreath, who is alleging that an opaque, under-the-radar state body may be pursuing the tax refunds of thousands of state residents haphazardly.

Throwing the weight of Attorney General Anthony Brown’s office at the legal crusade, the state has called Galbreath’s claims “baseless conspiracy theories.”

A CCU representative responded to a Banner interview request by saying the agency “does not comment on ongoing litigation” but did provide answers to some background questions regarding agency operations.

Galbreath’s current lawsuit, which deals not with a specific debt but access to certain records, is set for trial in May, and has slowly pulled back the curtain on how the small agency operates. It does so, one could argue, for a core pillar of a functional society: that people should pay their debts.

But when Galbreath first got word of the debt more than a year before the tax return notice, it told him to request an investigation within 15 days if he believed it was wrong. He did. He never heard from them for more than a year.

What the public owes

In the past decade the amount of money that people owe the state government has roughly doubled.

As of February, Marylanders currently owe Annapolis about $3.8 billion to more than 100 public agencies for everything from overdue E-ZPass bills to probation-related fees.

That’s up from $1.9 billion referred to the CCU across more than 2.4 million accounts in a single year, according to a 2015 audit. (Each account represents a payment due, not a person, meaning it’s possible for someone to have multiple accounts.) The agency collected more than $134 million worth of that debt, the audit found.

The unit’s roughly 120 state employees are armed with various methods to get Marylanders to pony up.

One is called the Tax Refund Intercept Program, which taps debtors’ state tax refunds to repay their debts. It requires certifying the debt to the state comptroller.

That method is what Galbreath is targeting. He received such a notice, and claimed in a lawsuit that the agency did not investigate the legitimacy of his debt within the 15 days they are legally obligated to.

“So I said to myself, ‘I wonder if they are doing this to other Maryland citizens?’ ” he told The Baltimore Banner.

And it gave him an idea.

What is the public owed?

Galbreath filed a request under the state Public Information Act for access to five years of documents concerning alleged civic debts and communications with debtors. He wanted to see how many people requested an investigation within the allotted 15 days and whether the CCU conducted it on time.

The request was denied, a state attorney explaining that the CCU couldn’t release records to him that weren’t his.

Galbreath refiled, narrowing the timeframe and requesting that any identifying information be redacted. Denied again, the state adding to its previous argument that pulling the files and redacting them would take staff hours costing more than $200,000.

A third refined request, a third denial, with the state reiterating its point: The documents contained personal tax information including Social Security numbers and were therefore not releasable by state law.

Additionally, they argued in court filings, TRIP notices are mostly form letters, and, after necessary redactions, they would essentially contain no information.

Assistant Attorney General Ken Gauvey wrote in a court filing that the PIA requests were an “unwarranted invasion of privacy on sensitive matters of individuals with whom he [Galbreath] has no relationship.”

Galbreath begs to differ. He’s asking for three documents per case, and he believes that the dates on the documents alone could tell him what he wants to know.

Galbreath vs. Goliath

While Marylanders owe quite a bit of money to the state, Galbreath does not. Not anymore.

But it took a while.

The agency sent out 2,208,333 TRIP notices to Marylanders between May 2018 and May 2020, and only a tiny fraction requested investigations, according to a letter Gauvey sent Galbreath and was filed with the Circuit Court.

Galbreath requested his in May 2019. He wouldn’t get it until requesting again in October 2020. He argues the delay violated the law. The state disagrees.

“Nothing in the statute or regulations provides that CCU may simply carry over an investigation protest” from one year to the next, Gauvey argued in a court filing, because TRIP is an annual process.

After investigating in the fall of 2020, the CCU determined the debt still stood — Galbreath’s insurance company hadn’t sent the right paperwork.

Galbreath requested an administrative hearing. Shortly after he uploaded his exhibits — the same documents he had previously sent the CCU — the agency dropped the debt without explanation, mooting his appeal.

“Mr. Galbreath is basing his PIA requests and claims on imagined violations of statutes that do not exist,” Gauvey wrote in a motion to dismiss the case. “Mr. Galbreath’s claims are frivolous and premised on unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.”

An honest misunderstanding, or a possible sign of a flawed debt-wrangling machine?

A 2018 report by the Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition, now called Economic Action Maryland, alleges the latter. It accuses the CCU of using “abusive, harassing tactics” to compel debtors to pay up, including calling individuals at unusual hours and showing little to no flexibility in establishing payment plans.

Unlike some consumer debts, civic debt does not expire, the report states, and the CCU can track a person’s income changes to settle a debt from even a decade prior that they were unable to pay. The amount will include a 17% surcharge the CCU tacks on because the agency is required to pay for its own operations.

People should pay their debts but be allowed to do so in a fair and sustainable manner, said Marceline White, executive director of Economic Action Maryland.

What the CCU collects is a “line item in our budgets in terms of revenue, and in this environment ... people don’t want to touch that,” said White, referring to the state’s current budget shortfall. “We’re generating revenue off the backs of low-income and working families.”

In Galbreath’s case, the Baltimore County Circuit Court already sided with the CCU once, accepting the argument that what he sought were tax documents. The appellate court disagreed, however, on the grounds that TRIP notices and investigations happen before a debt’s certification to the state comptroller. The Circuit Court now must examine the CCU’s other arguments in May.

As he prepares, Galbreath has combed through the agency’s handbook, where he discovered the CCU has an incentive program for its agents to bring in more money.

He’s sought multiple depositions of agency staff, including digging into their record-keeping practices to understand why it would cost so much to pull files and redact them. The deposition requests led the CCU to file a protective order against him.

In February, he testified against a bill in Annapolis sought by Attorney General Brown that would allow agencies to lodge formal complaints against those who file “frivolous, vexatious or abusive” public information requests.

Galbreath called the bill “draconian.”

Responding to a concern about how the bill may impact the press, a representative for the AG’s office said the proposed law was meant more for “requesters who are asking the agency for the same documents over and over again or have a personal axe to grind.”

Galbreath insists he brought this lawsuit simply as a concerned citizen, as someone who believes “strongly in good government.”

“The best way to have to have good government is to have open and transparent government, and you ensure that it’s a government of the people, by the people, for the people. I mean, that may seem old fashioned and corny to some, but it matters. It matters to me.”