A series of bills amending the new personal property tax reform effort were signed by the Governor this month.  House Bills 5525-5527, 5545, and 5176 were all signed with immediate effect over the past two weeks.

The bulk of this package of bills arose from Treasury’s initial experience, early this year, with the first phase-out of Eligible Manufacturing Personal Property certification filings. As Treasury worked with the assessing and business communities, they discovered numerous concerns with the structure of the forms, filing deadlines, and process for dealing with corrections or amendments to those filings.  The main result in these bills was an agreement to allow a 2016-only extension of the EMPP filing window for businesses until May 31st of this year.  The bills also included amendments to address the state and local process for handling any additional filings and/or corrections that occur as a result of those filings.

While HB 5176 was originally requested by the League to address a technical concern with the distribution formula for revenue that is set to be sent to the 300+ cities that received a reimbursement check last fall for their small taxpayers exemption losses from 2014 and 2015, the extension of the filing window for EMPP also necessitated a short delay in the reimbursement schedule from PPT losses from October 20th, 2016 until November 20, 2016.  This delay will only impact the 2016 reimbursement payment timing.  Treasury has been awaiting the statutory correction to the formula so that they could distribute approximately $3.5 million additional dollars to those cities eligible for reimbursement of those small taxpayer exemption losses.  Reimbursement checks from this $3.5 million fund should be distributed before the end of this month.

Chris Hackbarth is the League’s director of state affairs. He can be reached at 517-908-0304and [email protected].