California officials are attempting to round up years worth of delinquent taxes, including millions of dollars from nine local residents.

Last week, the Franchise Tax Board posted a list on its Web site that names 250 individuals and corporations it says owe the most in income taxes for 2007 and prior years. It shows total delinquencies of $191 million, including $3.3 million officials say is owed by six North San Diego County residents and $1.3 million by three Southwest Riverside County residents.

The $191 million is a sharp increase from the $123 million on the state's top-250 list last year. The amounts include additional fines piled on each year.

Agency spokeswoman Denise Aziki said the top 250 represent about 8 percent of $2.4 billion in delinquencies the state is actively trying to collect.

The $191 million compares to the $55.7 billion in personal income tax and $13.1 billion in corporate income tax revenue foreseen in California's 2008-09 budget.

The list, which was first published in 2007 and updated last year and again this month, is the result of a 2006 law authored by Assemblyman Jerome Horton, D-Inglewood.

"Not only did the (debtors) not want people to know they weren't paying," Horton said in 2007, "the policing agency didn't want people to know that they were getting away with it. The hammer of the bill is that it tries to embarrass them."

The tax board said it has collected $14 million from delinquent taxpayers after it warned or attempted to warn 1,000 of them in October that their names could be made public.

Some of the individuals on the list appear in public telephone directories with phone numbers that still work, including James and Katherine Riley of Murrieta, who didn't respond to questions about their place on the list, which says they owe $437,900 in back taxes.

The list also includes corporations whose registrations have lapsed and whose addresses have changed, such as Apollo Systems Inc., a company that allegedly fell $437,700 behind while based in Carmel Valley.

Many of the companies on the list no longer exist. The state has Michelle Quinn, who once ran the Liberty Motors used-car dealership in Oceanside, on the hook for nearly $1.7 million in personal income taxes. A friend screening calls for Quinn said fines account for much of that, but even the state's initial claim of $1.3 million is laughable for a business whose annual profit never exceeded $500,000, he said.

The friend declined to explain how the state arrived at the total and did not make Quinn available for comment.

Taxpayers have argued that errors arise from bureaucratic bumbling. Richard Rider, chairman of San Diego Tax Fighters, a watchdog and advocacy group, said he believes the state's list has snared people through a range of conditions that include bureaucratic errors, the weak economy and the difficulty of navigating increasingly complex federal and state tax laws.

"The tax law -- no one understands it, even the people who enforce it," Rider said.

One taxpayer whose name appeared on a similar list in 2007 from the Board of Equalization, which collects California sales tax, said he was a mere salesman for a business but got saddled with its sales tax debt when the owner died.

The state is trying to collect $361,000 from San Marcos resident Lynn Atnip, who said he was one of several dozen local residents who lost money in an investment scam run in part by Clementine Estrada, who recently was sentenced to four years in federal prison. Atnip said Estrada's group told him the investment would allow him to defer taxes on prior capital gains. But he no longer has the wherewithal to pay the taxes because he lost the capital gains in their scam.

"What the state should be doing is transferring the tax liability to these people (Estrada's group)," said Richard Stanczyk, a former IRS investigator who is assisting Atnip.

Stanczyk said the IRS had agreed to take a second look at Atnip's case and hopes the Franchise Tax Board will do the same.

Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (760) 740-5444 or cbagley@nctimes.com. Read his blogs at http://bizblogs.nctimes.com.