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The following press release was issued on Tuesday by the Alabama Republican Party.
MONTGOMERY – A proposal to help returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans find work passed the Alabama House of Representatives on Tuesday, as lawmakers continued their commitment to making job growth legislation the top priority in the 2012 Regular Session. The House also passed enabling legislation for the Alabama Job Creation and Retention Act, which allows the Governor and economic developers to use incentives similar to ones used on the Mercedes project to lure industry to the state. (more…)PUBLISHED IN
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The State of New Mexico’s 2012 legislative session ended Thursday at noon. A number of legislative proposals never made it to the floor, including a proposed State Graduate Employment Tax Credit (see previous post). (more…)
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The House – Senate Conference has come to an agreement on what is now dubbed The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012. Expectations are high that both the House and Senate will quickly pass the bill. President Obama has already indicated he will sign the bill.
Unfortunately, the tax extenders, including the general WOTC extension, were completely excluded from this legislation. All WOTC categories except for those favoring military veterans must now wait to be extended by another yet future tax bill.
As I’ve summarized before, this situation is not unusual for the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) program. Of the eight times Congress has acted to renew or extend the WOTC program, three were passed retroactively months after the program’s legislative authority had expired.- The first was in March 2002 after WOTC expired on December 31, 2001.
- The second was in October 2004, about ten months after WOTC expired on December 31, 2003.
- The worst example to date was in December 2006, when the program was reauthorized almost 12 months after its expiration.
In each of these events, the renewal was made effective retroactively back to the date of expiration. In other words, employers were eligible to claim tax credits generated by properly certified employees hired between the expiration date and the date the WOTC program was renewed.
We continue to anticipate a similar re-authorization in 2012. For this reason, my firm will continue to process and submit WOTC applications under all employee-eligibility categories — not just for veterans.
As employers consider their strategy for 2012, they should remember that even though a general extension has not yet been passed, eligibility-categories for hiring military veterans are already authorized through 2012 by the VOW to Hire Heroes Act of 2011. The amount of tax credit currently offered for hiring unemployed veterans goes as high as $9,600 per qualifying hire.
This is an excellent opportunity to more affirmatively recruit veterans for your workforce.PUBLISHED IN
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I thought you might appreciate the following excerpt from a recent email update I received from WOTC Coalition President Paul Suplizio. Some of this has been reported in the news but Paul’s perspective adds something important. I am re-publishing this with his permission.
In a statement [Monday], Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor said they will no longer require offsets for the $100 billion cost to extend the payroll tax cut to the end of the year, and are preparing a bill that will extend the payroll tax cut separately if the conference reaches no agreement, leaving the conference to continue working on unemployment insurance and Medicare doctors’ payments.
The conference committee is being notified of this new Republican position, which means $100 billion of the total $160 billion cost of the payroll bill would not have to be offset.
The conferees still have time to reach agreement on a total package, but if they don’t the Speaker is free to make the effort to pass a stand-alone bill extending the payroll tax only. This would remove payroll tax as a partisan issue, but the Speaker is likely to need Democratic support because of the roughly ninety Republicans who would not vote to increase the deficit.
Senator Reid is expected to make the extenders part of the bill he has said he will introduce if the conference bogs down. He will have the option to bring it to a vote or attach it to any stand-alone payroll bill that passes the House.
Unemployment compensation and doc fix remain “must do” issues, even if payroll tax is passed separately—thus we continue to work for the tax extenders to be added to HR 3630 in conference.
If $40 billion for tax extenders is added, the total requiring offset would be $100 billion for unemployment insurance, doctors’ fix, and the tax extenders. Democrats are arguing unemployment insurance should not be offset, and a good case can be made for not offsetting the tax extenders.
Comments: The Republican leadership’s concession on not requiring a budget offset to the “cost” of the payroll-tax-cut extension reduces the total amount of offsets needed to pass all of the priority items. One of those priority items is the tax extenders, which will presumably include WOTC.
What this boils down to is that we are likely to at least see legislation soon with tax extenders attached. Whether Congress can pass it, of course, is a separate question. Nothing is certain and the political environment remains volatile.PUBLISHED IN
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