Could D.C.’s Office of Tax and Revenue be secret Bing fans? Probably not, nobody would actually cop to using Bing. But the city’s tax-collection agency did recently hit Google Inc. with a $300,000 tax lien, only to later realize that the bill was sent in error.

The Washington Times discovered the Internet conglomerate among a list of companies that owe the city late payments of the corporate franchise tax, the cost of doing business in D.C. Only, it turned out that the lien was a mistake:

“The lien was filed in error and it is being removed,” D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue spokeswoman Natalie Wilson wrote in an email Thursday.

Asked why and how such an error could have been made, Ms. Wilson replied that “there was a delay in applying payment to the account.” But in a subsequent email, she wrote that there was a “misapplication of payment to the account, which resulted in a tax liability.”

Not that $300,000 is much for Google, which in the third quarter of 2012 alone reported $14 billion in revenue, but mistakes are mistakes. Besides, Google works strenuously to lower its tax bills from wherever it does business. It wired $10 billion in revenue last year through a shell company in Bermuda in order to save $2 billion in taxes around the world, USA Today reported in December.