9 Actions Florida Should Take to Help Taxpayers Impacted by Hurricane Ian

1.     Postpone tax notices and waive penalties or interest for late tax filings in affected areas

2.     Extend the date for residents to take advantage of the tax discounts they would normally receive for paying property taxes and special assessments in November and postpone or defer the deadline for property tax installment payments

3.     Protect individual and business taxpayers from the risks for notices that they will likely not receive because their home or business addresses is not accessible anymore

4.     Issue no new audits in severely impacted areas, extend the statute of limitations and postpone existing audits that haven’t reached the assessment stage because these can’t be responded to while entire communities are still recovering

5.     Create procedures for fairly estimating taxes which can’t be calculated because records have been destroyed by the storm, moving away from the current method which significantly overestimates activity if no records are available

6.     Initiate procedures to offer payment plan assistance for late taxes, rather than resorting to the standard collection methods, like liens, levies, or bank freezes

7.     Retroactively apply the recently passed law that provides property tax refunds for residential property rendered uninhabitable as a result of a catastrophic event

8.     Provide tangible personal property relief and allow n on-residential properties rendered uninhabitable to receive property tax refunds

9.     Get Congress to pass a Disaster Tax Relief Act that includes provisions from past packages, including elements such as an Employee Retention Credit, an enhanced casualty loss deduction, and other relief provisions

Other Resources

Florida TaxWatch Statement on Hurricane Ian Recovery

Community Involvement

Budget Watch - More Revenue for the Next Budget

As the Florida Legislature prepares to go into conference budget negotiations to finalize the FY2018-19 budget, state estimators gave lawmakers a bit of good news. Florida’s General Revenue (GR) Estimating Conference met on February 9 and forecast that the state would collect an additional $461.8 million in FY2017-18 and FY2018-19. This is money for the new budget that the House and Senate did not know they had when they developed their spending plans in the first half of this session. Estimated GR was revised upward by $181.3 million in FY2017-18 and by $280.5 million in FY2018-19.

The increased estimates are not the result of better-than-expected economic and normal revenue growth. Earlier estimating conferences had adopted slightly weaker near-term national and state economic forecasts. Instead, the change comes mostly from two factors: increased sales tax collections from hurricane rebuilding and a change in how gaming payments from the Seminole Tribe are made.

Since the last estimates were made in August 2017, actual collections have come in slightly below the forecast. The economists believe this is due to disruptions from Hurricane Irma. Without the hurricane and gaming factors, the GR estimates would have largely been unchanged. In fact, more revenue sources had decreased estimates than increased over the two-year period. Sales taxes, the state’s largest revenue source, was increased by $359.4 million over the two years—more than two-thirds of that is from hurricane rebuilding. Indian Gaming revenues were increased by $106.7 million. Some of the increase ($25.3 million) is due to higher net casino winnings, but most ($81.4 million) comes from the change in revenue sharing methodology. The hurricane and the gaming methodology account for 75.7 percent of the total GR increase.

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