Your Rights as a Maryland Taxpayer
Individuals and businesses remitting income, sales and use, admissions and amusement, motor fuel and/or alcohol and tobacco taxes have many rights under state law and the administrative policies of the Comptroller's Office. It is a pleasure to provide you with this summary of your rights under Maryland law and the policies I have established as state comptroller to ensure fair treatment for all taxpayers.
For more information, please read our full Taxpayer Bill of Rights.
Let's start with what we don't collect. We don't collect or capture names; home, business, or e-mail addresses; telephone numbers; or account information unless you voluntarily give us that information for a specific purpose. If you do give us that information, we use it only for the stated purpose. We don't use cookies to track visitors to our Web site; however, for some of the interactive applications we do use them to hold your session information. Once you finish the application the cookie is removed.
Our web server software automatically logs the following information every time someone visits our Web site:
Information We Collect
| Information | Definition |
|---|---|
| Date | Date the visit occurred |
| Time | Time the visit occurred |
| Client IP | Internet Protocol address of the visitor |
| Server IP | Internet Protocol address of Web server accessed. This will always be the IP address of our Web server. We do not and cannot track sites you visit other than our Web site. |
| HTTP Status | Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) status or error code |
| HTTP Request URL | Identifies the Web page or file requested |
| Bytes Sent | Amount of data sent from the Web server to a visitor during that connection |
| Bytes Received | Amount of data sent from the visitor to the Web server |
| User Agent | Type of Web browser or client software that made request to the Web server |
| Referrer | Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that referred a visitor to the requested file |
| Protocol Version | Version of HTTP used by the visitor's Web browser software |
How We Use the Information
We do not and will not sell this information or distribute it to anyone outside the agency.
We use the information we gather from your visit to help us improve our Web site. For example, by tracking how many people visit the Web site, when they visit, and the pages they visit, we can give visitors more of the kind of information they want and need. And, by tracking client software (e.g., browser type), we can avoid using features on our site that visitors cannot view or use.
Laws That Protect Your Privacy
The privacy of all tax information, including any information you submit to our Web site or information accessed through our Web site (such as the status of your refund), is protected by the Tax General Article of the Maryland Annotated Code, Section 13 - 202. The tax confidentiality law prohibits any state employee from divulging confidential tax information.