Tag: Kemp Strickler

House Votes to Stem Penalties when Tax Credits Meet Caps

      Many Missourians are already not a fan of tax filing day, which came this week.  As Representative Becky Laubinger (R-Park Hills) explains, some of them have been surprised with additional reasons to be aggravated, in past years.

Representative Becky Laubinger (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

“How much worse would it be if, after you file your taxes, feeling like you’ve paid it in full, and then you get hit with a penalty and interest?  My bill deals with that penalty and interest for tax credits that the tax filer qualified for in every way.”

      The issue Laubinger’s bill deals with is that when there are enough claims against a state tax credit for it to reach its annual cap, some claimants, even though they met all qualifications, will get a bill from the Department of Revenue for the amount they claimed, plus interest and penalties.  This is in spite of the fact that there is no way for them to know that cap would been reached.

      House Bill 828, “would remove the penalties and interest for someone who qualified for a tax credit but the state hit the cap.  They would still have to pay their taxes in full within 60 days or they would receive penalties and interest,” Laubinger told her colleagues.

      Those bills from the Department of Revenue put some Missourians off claiming tax credits, many of which benefit benevolent organizations such as food banks, children’s crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, and other charities that serve those most at need in their communities.

      “It discourages neighbors helping neighbors, it discourages people from giving to their local organizations, and often even gives a bad reputation in the community for those help organizations,” said Laubinger. 

      Arnold representative Phil Amato (R) for many years was the president of his local food pantry.  He has sponsored similar legislation, having experienced firsthand what happens when these bills are sent out.

“Sometimes it takes you two to three years to talk somebody that has the wherewithal to write a check, and you tell them that it’s a 50 percent tax credit, that they’re going to get half their money back, and then they get a letter from the Department of Revenue that some of their donation has been disqualified, and then adding insult to injury is they’re charging them penalty and interest,” Amato explained.  “Then the person is really upset because you’ve convinced them, ‘It’ll make you feel good to write this check to the local food pantry and help people that are hungry.’”

      Laubinger’s bill enjoys broad bipartisan support, with no votes being cast against it as went through two House committees and was advanced to the Senate, 151-0.

Representative Del Taylor (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      Representative Del Taylor (D-St. Louis), the top Democrat on the House’s Ways and Means committee, through which the legislation was passed, urged those in his party to support the proposal.

      “Fundamentally, if you made charitable donations and that donation’s tax credits were oversubscribed, you don’t necessarily get the full discount on your taxes, and what the lady is doing here is saying, ‘You didn’t get the full discount on your taxes, but you shouldn’t also be subject to penalties and interest.”

      Amato said he would like to know whether the state is even making back the money that it spends on collecting these taxes and penalties.

      “The Department of Revenue has to figure out they’ve exceeded the cap, then somebody has to sit down and write the letter.  I bet you we’d be shocked at how much that letter costs, leaving the Department of Revenue and getting it to its end result, and then if it’s somebody who’s never got one before, then there’s letters going back and forth, then the person’s making a phone call to the Department of Revenue.”

      “This thing is an expensive bookkeeping error for the Department of Revenue to do, so we need to get this thing wiped out,” Amato said.

Representative Kemp Strickler (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      It’s now up to the state’s Senate to consider Laubinger’s proposal, but the House will have another chance to act.  The Senate version of her bill is awaiting action in a House committee.

      Either way, Representative Kemp Strickler (D-Lee’s Summit) is one of the many who hopes it will reach the desk of Governor Mike Kehoe (R).

      “This is such a good bill.  We should not be penalizing folks who are doing their best to give to charitable groups and then, because the cap has been hit because people like it so much, we should not be charging interest and penalties on this.”

Other provisions in the bill would add to the income tax deduction for the sale or lease of farmland to beginning farmers a definition of “taxpayer;” and would stipulate that filing day for Missouri taxes must always coincide with the federal tax filing day.

House votes to Criminalize Clandestine Tracking of Vehicles

      Legislation that is key in the fight to protect victims of domestic violence was one of the proposals the House sent to the Senate before legislators went home for their spring break.

Representatives Bill Irwin, Cecelie Williams, and Kemp Strickler (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      The House voted unanimously to send to the Senate a bill that would criminalize the placing of tracking devices on a vehicle without the knowledge or consent of all recorded owners of that vehicle.  Missouri has no prohibition on such tracking, which is often used by domestic abusers to follow the movements of their victims.

      The bipartisan legislation was sponsored by three legislators.  One of those is Ditmer Republican Cecelie Williams, who filed House Bill 971.  She has shared several times this session her own experience as a survivor of domestic violence, in explaining why she is carrying such bills.

      Williams said Missouri should be addressing vehicle tracking in law.

      “This is really something that’s installed on your vehicle [or] within your vehicle, that you are unaware of that is being used to track you for any reason at all, whether there is malice or malicious intent behind it, none of that should matter.  It’s that if you are going to put a tracking device on your vehicle, that all owners of the vehicle are aware that it’s there,” Williams told colleagues.

      “What this bill does is it provides a criminal offense, a Class A misdemeanor for the first offense, and a Class B felony for a second offense, by violating this law and putting GPS tracking devices on a vehicle [without notifying] all owners that this was being placed.”

      Two bills similar to Williams’ were filed, and then combined with hers.  One of those, House Bill 978, was sponsored by Lee’s Summit Republican Bill Irwin, a retired Navy Seal and Lees Summit Police officer.  When he was presented this legislation he thought, “This is very much common sense.  Who could be against it?”

      Irwin said he saw firsthand the “evils of tracking,” when deployed to Pakistan as a liaison officer for the Special Operations Command Central to the U.S. Embassy. 

A diplomat he worked with there was a woman known for her diplomatic and physical prowess.  One of Irwin’s colleagues became interested in her but she turned the man down.  What happened next was frightening.

Representatives Bill Irwin, Cecelie Williams, and Kemp Strickler (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      “My military coworker found out that she was returning to the states and [he] took emergency leave to go back prior to her departure.  Fortunately, law enforcement had been appraised of the situation and figured out he was tracking her.  They detained him at the airport and they found in his car a body bag, duct tape, flex cuffs, sharp surgical knives, and a bone saw,” Irwin told the House Transportation Committee.  “Using the tracker evidence and the stuff on him they were able to send him to jail, where I believe he’s still spending time.”

      The sponsor of another version, House Bill 293, is Lee’s Summit Democrat Kemp Strickler.  He said his first introduction to the issue came from a constituent. 

      “Their partner had been tracked without her knowledge by an ex-boyfriend for quite some time, and they only found out about it because they took it into an auto repair or something like that, and they found it and that’s when they learned that she was being tracked.  That was of obvious concern to them and something that he said to me, that’s something we should work with.”

      He also referenced a high-profile double murder-suicide that happened in Lenexa, Kansas, in which a woman from Belton, 22 year old Sara Beck, was murdered.  Investigators believe she was tracked with a GPS device by her ex-boyfriend.

“The ex-boyfriend also set up a geo-fence that would automatically notify him when she showed up at work, when she showed up at a friend’s house, and when she showed up at home,” Strickler told colleagues. 

“Her father said the police have to get a warrant in order to do that to somebody.  Now we’ve got the general public just doing that.”

“This isn’t going to stop it but this will allow us to do something about it when it’s found,” said Strickler. 

“This is a bipartisan bill, this is a public safety bill.  This is going to help protect domestic abuse survivors and hopefully it will, frankly, discourage people from placing them on the vehicles of government officials and legislators, too.”

      The House voted 151-0 to send the legislation to the Senate.

House Votes to Rein In Vehicle Assessments

      The House voted unanimously this week to ensure that Missourians would not experience increases in the taxes they pay for vehicles ever again.

Representative Rodger Reedy (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      House Bill 816 is the latest attempt by representatives to block something that happened post-Covid from being repeated.  During and after the pandemic supply lines for parts and vehicles were hindered, and the demand for, and value of, used vehicles was inflated.  That meant Missourians’ property tax bills also increased.

“If you will remember, in 2021 and ’22, people saw the assessment values go up on their cars and when those assessments went up their taxes went up, and that was kind of caused by the market value of used cars,” recalls bill sponsor Rodger Reedy (R-Windsor). 

He told his colleagues in the House Chamber, “Many of you in this room, if you go back and look at your tax bills from ’21, ’22, ’23, you are paying more money on the same car that was a year older, that had maybe 20 or 30 thousand more miles on it, and it was not right.”

      Reedy said part of the problem is that state law requires assessors to use the October issue of the National Automobile Dealers Associations (NADA) Used Car Guide to determine the value of vehicles.  Reedy and others have proposed for several years now that the law allow the State Tax Commission to select a publication from those available, for assessors to use that year. 

      “I don’t believe that we should be putting in statute that you have to do business with a certain company, and this corrects that … they may be one that bids on it and they may be the best bidder, but it gives the other companies the opportunity to do that as well,” said Reedy.  “What they would do is do a bidding process with different companies to provide that information and then, basically, they would probably use the lowest and best bid, which in turn would save taxpayer dollars.”

      Reedy’s proposal would also state that no vehicle can be assessed at a value greater than it had, the year prior. 

      Though the proposal has not reached the governor’s desk in past years, that has not been for lack of bipartisan support.

Representative Kemp Strickler (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)

      Lee’s Summit Representative Kemp Strickler (D) said the bill would be, “a great way to make sure that the issues that we saw during Covid don’t reoccur, where again, those used car values, those should be going down and the amount that people pay on those should be going down.  We know that there was an artificial bubble back then.  I think this does a really good job of addressing that and making sure the taxpayers aren’t on the hook if that happens ever again.”

      Representative Del Taylor (D-St. Louis) called the tax increases during Covid an “anomaly” that should be prevented, “and basically he’s saying that no, the assessment cannot exceed what it was last year.  Excellent idea.”

      HB 816 receive no “no” votes in three House committees and the full Chamber, the latter of which voted 157-0 to send it to the Senate.