Lawmakers Push For Corporate Tax Transparency Plan
By aaroncynic in News on Nov 28, 2012 8:25PM
Top Illinois legislative leaders pushed for a bill this week to require businesses whose profits are subject to income taxes to release information from their tax records. Senate President John Cullerton and House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie called for legislation which they say would ensure that corporations in Illinois are paying their fair share in taxes. According to The Republic, the bill would require publicly traded corporations operating in Illinois to publish data related to their tax liability two years after a given tax year.
“Public policymakers can’t make good public policy if they don’t know what’s going on,” Currie told The Chicago Tribune. “We don’t know whether those 66 percent of corporations that pay no income tax in fact don’t have any profits.” Corporate tax income in Illinois was $2.9 billion at the end of the fiscal year, a $700 million increase over the prior year due to a temporary tax increase which took effect in 2011 and expires in 2014. Proponents of the corporate tax-transparency plan say disclosure will help decide if future changes in the tax code would be needed.
Business leaders reacted with outrage to the proposed bill. Fox News reports Illinois Chamber of Commerce President Doug Whitley said in a statement “Taxpayers should not have to defend their returns in the court of public opinion, against subjective accusations of what constitutes their ‘fair share.’” Vice president of the Illinois Manufacturing Association Mark Denzler told the Tribune the bill would reveal “confidential tax information that we don't think should be released publicly.”
While corporate leaders are trying to paint tax-transparency as anti-business, supporters say it helps level the playing field, especially in an environment where politics has a history of handing out millions to corporations in credits and breaks. Michael Mazerov, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington told the Tribune “The public needs better information to really understand and get engaged in what's happening with corporate tax policy and what corporations are paying and what provisions of the tax code need to be fixed.”