Nick Stafford waits on line at local DMV with five wheelbarrows full of pennies. (David Crigger/Bristol Herald Courier)
A Virginia man who had a beef with the Department of Motor Vehicles settled his sales tax bill with 298,745 pennies.
Workers at the DMV office in Lebanon, in rural southwestern Virginia, had to spend hours counting the pennies by hand when the coin-counting machine jammed.
Nick Stafford carted the pennies into the DMV in five wheelbarrows Wednesday. The coins weighed 1,600 pounds.
“If they were going to inconvenience me, then I was going to inconvenience them,” he told the Bristol Herald Courier.
The paper reported that Stafford became incensed in September when he attempted to call the Lebanon DMV and was routed to a call center in faraway Richmond.
That led Stafford to file three lawsuits after he couldn’t get the phone numbers of nine local DMV offices. On Tuesday a judge dismissed the cases after an attorney for the DMV gave Stafford the numbers, the paper reported.
Stafford paid 11 people a total of $440 to scatter the pennies out of their rolls with hammers.
The wheelbarrows cost him another $400.
Stafford says he owed the DMV $2,987.14 in sales tax after purchasing two new SUVs with cash.
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