Thursday, March 11, 2010

68. DuBose Porter: Revenue Department still not ready to give you your money.

Tom Crawford wrote an article explaining the problem with the cheaters who take your paid sales tax money and keep it for themselves instead of returning it to you (we used that article in blog #62). An excerpt follows:

CRAWFORD / Lawmakers should go where the money is http://www.charltoncountyherald.com/articles/2010/02/16/opinion/editorials/doc4b7abcc8cfbbe844297319.txtBy Tom Crawford

Georgia loses buckets of tax dollars every year because of retailers who charge the sales tax on their customers but keep the money rather than send it to the revenue department. This problem is well known to lawmakers and revenue officials, but they haven’t done much to deal with it.

A pilot program in Hall County uncovered the fact that nearly 1,000 businesses in that county do not have sales tax numbers, which means they are not reporting their sales tax collections to the state. There are several hundred businesses that do not have a business license from their local government.

House Minority Leader DuBose Porter (D-Dublin) and his Democratic colleagues have been trying in vain for more than a year to pass legislation that would crack down on these renegade businesses who are cheating the state of sales tax proceeds.


Now another reporter, Jay Jones of the Rockdale Citizen, has published another story that shows the the reality that Georgia's elected Republican leadership and Georgia's Republican appointed Revenue Commissioner Bart Graham are refusing to give you back your money:



Excerpts follow from:

Porter says collect taxes in a new way (Rockdale Citizen)
CONYERS — Democratic candidate for Georgia governor DuBose Porter said his proposal to collect sales taxes from “cheaters” could reap millions for the strapped state budget and questioned why current state leaders have failed to act on it rather than offer new cuts.
Reporter: Jay Jones
Email Address: jay.jones@rockdalecitizen.com

State Rep. DuBose Porter, D-Dublin, speaks to the Bar Association of Rockdale County on Friday. The 28-year legislator is running for governor in the Democratic primary.

CONYERS — Democratic candidate for Georgia governor DuBose Porter said his proposal to collect sales taxes from “cheaters” could reap millions for the strapped state budget and questioned why current state leaders have failed to act on it rather than offer new cuts...
“I say before we start cutting education and raising taxes, let’s get what we should get from the cheaters,” Porter said. “This would be a GPS system telling you who’s cheating.”
As the state minority leader in the Georgia House, Porter, D-Dublin, got a pilot project done in Hall and Lowndes counties last year that showed that a quarter of all business license-holders had not paid sales taxes. The proposal is now in the General Assembly as House Bill 1137.
Porter added the state’s Department of Revenue had been against the proposal. “Either they are incompetent, hiding something or protecting somebody. I don’t know,” he said.
 Porter said the proposal could also help counties in finding businesses that have a sales tax certificate but not a business license.
In an editorial to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Department of Revenue Commissioner Bart Graham discounted Porter’s amount of $1 billion lost from cheaters. Also, Graham countered that part of Porter’s proposal that would allow counties to privatize tax collections would expose a businesses’ tax records.
Porter said during Friday’s luncheon that the Department of Revenue under its current system is unable to account for sales tax collections that exceed what was designated for the counties in local sales tax revenue receipts. Now, any unaccounted sales tax received is put into the state’s treasury. Porter said that while the state gets its 4 percent of sales tax, the counties with their 1 percent sales taxes are the ones that suffer from the loss of unaccounted tax revenue...

To read the whole story click here:


_______________________

DuBose Porter, Governor 2010

Getting your money back for you.

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