Author: Michele Steel

A new law, which might take the prize for the worst piece of legislation in 2009, requires nearly 200,000 California businesses to register and file use tax payments with the Board of Equalization (BOE) by April 15th. This onerous regulation will cost more to comply with – because of the unbelievable inconvenience it causes business owners – than the state will make in revenue.

The new law requires all business owners with gross revenue over $100,000, that are not already registered with the BOE, to register for a use tax account and file use tax returns for 2007, 2008, 2009, and for every year in the future.

That’s right: three years of filings will be due on the same day taxpayers must file state and federal income tax and payroll taxes.

AB 4x 18 was signed into law in July 2009. The Board rushed to begin implementation in November 2009, but many businesses received the news as late as mid-March 2010, and more have yet to be notified. If you haven’t received a letter and your business makes over $100,000 in gross revenue, it is your responsibility to register and file use tax returns by April 15th.

California has been afflicted by the curse of the runaway
corporation for sometime now. With the announcement on Monday that aerospace
giant, Northrop Grumman Corp., will be moving its headquarters from Los Angeles
to Washington D.C., we lose the last major aerospace firm in the state.

Northrop, California’s 3^rd largest Fortune 500
Company, is the most recent departure in a long list of top companies to leave
the state.  As reported in the Los
Angeles Times, Northrop’s relocation means only 19 Fortune 500’s remain in
California, when in 2006 there were 23. 
Though the company will still be one of the state’s largest private
employers, the loss is a blow to California, the birthplace of the aerospace
industry.

Northrop’s CEO, Wes Bush, says the company is moving its
headquarters to be closer to its biggest client: the U.S. Government.  But the move makes a bigger impact when
we look at other industries that have been fleeing California. Hilton
Hotels Corp. recently relocated to Fairfax, Virginia, to lower its cost of
doing business. EBay,
the online auction website with deep roots in San Jose, recently announced it
will be creating 450 new jobs at a $334 million complex in Utah, in return for
$30 million in tax breaks from the state. 
And there’s much more….

A U.S. Treasury Department study shows that the national Cap and Trade plan (Cap and Tax), which passed through the House in June, will cost American households nearly $2,000 a year.

In California we don’t have to wait for the U.S. Senate to pass Cap and Tax to feel the massive burden of government’s attempt to insignificantly slow Global Warming: We have AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, as law today. For three years, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has been hard at work inventing environmental regulations that will kill the California economy.

AB 32 is a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California to 1990 levels by 2020, and by 80% by 2050. CARB is charged with imposing and enforcing measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from nearly every phase of life and work in the state.

A June study, commissioned by the California Small Business Roundtable, concluded that the plan could result in average annual losses of $182.6 billion, or 10%, of gross state output – that’s one and a half times the state budget – from small businesses alone. That translates to nearly 1.1 million lost jobs. The report also estimates a cut of more than 25% in the average family’s discretionary spending.

Today I am proud to announce that the BOE agreed to sponsor Assembly Bill 1506 (Anderson) yesterday at our Board Hearing in Sacramento. The bill, which was luckily revived from the suspense file on Friday, will allow taxpayers that receive IOUs from the state, to return those IOUs as payment for any obligations owed to the state.

When we agreed to accept IOUs from taxpayers at our July 21st hearing, we requested for Board staff to return on August 31st, with a legislative proposal to standardize the policy of the Board regarding registered warrants.

The Board is not currently required by law to accept state-issued IOUs, but has done so this year as well as in 1992, the last time IOUs were issued by the state. The BOE staff proposal, approved yesterday, as an amendment for AB 1506, will clarify the law for the BOE to accept IOUs automatically when they are issued in the future.

A bill being crafted in the closed-rooms of our nation’s capital raises serious concerns about interference by the Federal government in the affairs of the states, and in the lives of our citizens. This seems to be just another rush to judgment on a complex issue that impacts millions of people without their input.

The United States has recently been the victim of a rash of cyber attacks, most notably by the Chinese and North Korean governments. There is no question that cybersecurity must be increased, but that does not mean that the Federal Government, which has continuously failed to protect its own infrastructure, should be trusted with the takeover of local government and private-sector networks, least of all without broad input from the affected parties.

Declan McCullagh, of CNET News, released an excerpt of draft legislation by West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller which appears to authorize the President to seize temporary control of private sector networks. The bill would allow the President to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and “direct the national response to a cyber threat.” What specifically is a cyber threat? It is defined loosely as any threat having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.

Congratulations
Californians! Sunday marked this year’s Cost of Government Day. For 235 days
Californians worked to cover government spending – for the next week and four
months, we can finally work for ourselves.

If you
pay close attention to the cost of government, you may be thinking to yourself,
"wasn’t Tax Freedom Day, the day we finish working off our tax bill, on April
20th?" That’s right.  But, as we
all know too well, the government has a knack for spending billions of dollars
more than it takes in, and we have to pay for that too.  After eight months, we have finally
finished paying for our state’s massive over-spending problem – eleven days
later than last year. And what did you get for those eleven days? Did you get a
better DMV? Less traffic on your morning commute? Better service from the post
office? I don’t think so.

Assembly Bill 469 is supposed to “increase awareness of the California use tax and increase compliance.” This bill creates more problems than it solves. AB 469, if passed, will only confuse and intimidate taxpayers into paying taxes they don’t owe.

Under current tax law, individuals and businesses are required to pay use tax (the equivalent of sales tax) on goods purchased out of state.

AB 469 would make it a requirement for individuals to report use tax on their income tax return, and require taxpayers to put a “0” on that line if they believe they do not owe any use tax. This puts taxpayers in a difficult position. Most taxpayers do not know the purpose of use tax, where it applies, or how to report it. Worse yet, they have to sign their return under penalty of perjury.

The worst part of this bill is that for individual purchases of items less than $1,000 dollars, taxpayers are not required to have receipts from which to calculate use tax. Instead, taxpayers are expected to use a “use tax table” to calculate the use tax due as a percentage of their taxable income.

California is not only facing a budget gap, but also an
education gap.  Hans Johnson, at
the Public Policy Institute of California, recently completed a study on
education in California entitled Educating
California: Choices for the Future. 
In this study, Johnson explains that by 2025, the number of Californians
graduating from college will not be able to meet the demands of employers that
increasingly require a highly educated workforce. The gap between the demands
of the economy and the supply of college educated workers is a serious threat
to the state’s economic future.

To put it simply: California is over-regulated, and under-educated. 

In a recent post, the OC Register’s small-business columnist, Jan Norman, posted a blog entitled GM’s Seven Deadly Mistakes. These are seven classic management mistakes that took GM from a great symbol of American enterprise, to a bankrupt and nationalized failure. I thought it would be fruitful to apply these to California’s current budget crisis. Here is the list:

1. Failure to read the “tea leaves”. California’s budget crisis has been long in coming. The state’s anti-business policies in everything from taxation to environmental regulation have made California’s business environment toxic. Last year’s historic budget delay, and the $42 billion dollar budget gap the February budget was meant to close, was a “leading indicator” that further budget troubles loomed ahead.