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

Cultivating Florida's Second Stage Companies

Florida has made the development of its entrepreneurial economy a key piece of its strategy for the creation of jobs and diversification of the economy. Along with the expansion of tourism marketing, helping existing companies expand, and recruiting new companies to Florida, these investments have begun to demonstrate substantial benefits for the state and local economies.

To further develop Florida’s growing entrepreneurial economy and provide opportunities for graduates of Florida schools (thereby improving the state’s return
on investment in K-20 education), Florida policymakers may look to the GrowFL program, which targets small, growing companies that have the most potential to create jobs. While GrowFL is currently available to companies statewide, expanding the statewide impact of the program could have a significant impact on Florida’s economy.

To analyze the viability of expanding the impact of GrowFL statewide, Florida TaxWatch modeled the economic impacts of the program creating 1,000 jobs per year in Florida for the next 10 years.1 These impacts were modeled with a dynamic, multi- period model from Regional Economics Models, Inc. (REMI).

The results of this simulation show that the expansion of the GrowFL program would be expected to produce more than 25,000 total jobs, with more than 23,000 of those in private non-farm sectors. The average salary of those jobs was estimated at more than $77,000, and the increase in state tax receipts is estimated to be more than $16.5 million per year. 

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