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[OH] Tax agency mostly at fault for delayed letters: Blackwell’s office got mailings years late
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| Contributor | None Entered |
| Last Edited | None Entered Feb 09, 2007 04:06pm |
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| Category | News |
| Media | Newspaper - Columbus Dispatch |
| News Date | Friday, February 9, 2007 10:05:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Thursday, February 08, 2007
Mark Niquette
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
J. Kenneth Blackwell was criticized by the new secretary of state, Jennifer L. Brunner, for leaving behind 50,000 notices to businesses and other issues.
When newly elected Secretary of State Jennifer L. Brunner discovered that the office did not start processing several years’ worth of certain corporate documents until 2006, she blamed her predecessor, J. Kenneth Blackwell.
Brunner even suggested that some businesses got away with not paying business taxes "because of the prior secretary’s failure to carry out his statutory duties."
But it turns out that the Ohio Department of Taxation, not Blackwell, was mostly to blame for the delay.
In part because of a glitch in the department’s computer system, notifications of businesses that failed to file annual tax returns or tax reports between 1999 and 2004 were not given to Blackwell’s office until early last year, said Gary Gudmundson, spokesman for the department.
The secretary of state’s office then sends letters to those businesses informing them that their corporate charters are being canceled as a result.
It’s unlikely that the state is missing out on much uncollected tax revenue because most of the businesses that don’t file annual corporate franchise tax returns — or tax reports if they are what are called S-corporations, in which owners pay income taxes — are out of business, Gudmundson said.
"There’s not a lot of liability out there to collect on," he said, noting that the minimum collection from each business is $50 and that about 85 percent of them turn out to be defunct.
Even so, the department went more than seven years without following the law and office policy of identifying businesses that hadn’t filed tax returns or tax reports for two years, before giving Blackwell’s office a list of 117,000 such businesses last spring. |
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