Fred Thompson checks in with a post on Oregon taxes.
To hear some folks talk, one might think that Oregon had repealed
its business taxes. That hasn’t happened. In 2013 Oregon’s corporate excise and
income tax receipts were in excess of $600 million. Nevertheless, the growth in
state personal
income tax receipts has greatly outstripped the growth in business
tax revenue. Arguably, even statewide
property tax revenues have grown faster.
There is a mystery here. Oregon’s statutory tax rate is unchanged
or even up slightly over the period. Moreover, its real state product (income) has
more than doubled (2.44 times) and profit’s share (pre-tax profit/GSY) of total
product, the CIT tax base, increased from about 7 to approximately 11 percent (1.57
times). Multiplying those figures together, one might expect real CIT receipts
be about 3.85 times what they were in 1980. In fact, they are only about half
that amount. What’s up?
To answer that question, I contrast Oregon CIT liabilities
accrued in 2013, $460 million, with a set of counterfactuals constructed using 2013
BEA and DOR data, which show what CIT payments would have been in the absence
of changes in the federal tax code, corporate tax avoidance, and state tax
credits, exemptions, and deductions. I also estimate the gross contribution to state
revenue due to the creation of the minimum alternative turnover tax put in
place by Oregon’s Measure 67 and improved CIT administration as a result of the
DOR’s core systems replacement.
The GAO reports that over this
period, the primary change in the federal CIT code was the enactment of the
pass-through provision in 1986 and its subsequent expansion in 1994, which means that the income
of individually, family, employee owned businesses, LLCs and S-corps passes
directly to their owners’ personal income tax (PIT) returns, without first
being taxed as corporate income. Prior to this change, ¾ of all business
profits were subject to the federal CIT. Now, slightly less than half are.
Because the computation of Oregon’s CIT begins with federal taxable income,
this reduced Oregon’s CIT receipts (and also increased PIT and capital gains
receipts). Had this change not occurred and if ¾ of all $20 billion in profits
earned in Oregon in 2013 were subject to its CIT (i.e., there were no
state-specific tax credits, deductions, or exemptions and no tax
avoidance/evasion of the part of businesses), Oregon CIT receipts would have
been about $1,095 million. In fact, only about half of the profits earned in
Oregon were subject to its CIT, which implies receipts of about $730 million.
In other words, expansion of the federal pass-through provision cost the
state’s CIT about $365 million in receipts (and increased PIT receipts by a complementary,
albeit almost certainly a smaller, amount).
Other changes at the national level after 1980 couldn’t have
caused decreases in Oregon’s corporate income tax revenues, because, generally
speaking, they have had the effect of increasing reported corporate income.
There is, nevertheless, a substantial discrepancy between Oregon’s CIT base according
to the BEA’s Income and Product Accounts, approximately $10 billion, as above, and
the declared tax base of $7.3 billion. Applying Oregon’s statutory CIT rate to
the latter yields only $530 million, approximately $200 million less than the
$730 billion that would have obtained in the absence of this gap. Moreover, it
is common knowledge that this sort of CIT base erosion is widespread
at the state level and increasing. Presumably, CIT base erosion is primarily
due to what is euphemistically known as corporate tax sheltering and planning –
what the rest of us would call tax avoidance/evasion.
Finally, there is the $70 million discrepancy between the
$460 million CITes accrued in 2013 and the $530 million figure obtained by
multiplying the reported CIT base by the statutory tax rate, which is due to
Oregon-specific deductions, exclusions, and credits, the bulk of which ($50
million) are due to environmental and energy related tax credits enacted after
1991.
Breaking down the sources of CIT base erosion to its
component parts, 58 percent is due to the U.S. tax code’s expanded pass-through
provisions, 31 percent to corporate tax sheltering and planning, and 11 percent
to state-specific deductions, exemptions, and credits.
What should be done? Before turning to that question, it is
useful to look at what has already been accomplished. In 2010, under Measure
67, Oregon adopted a minimum-tax scheme whereby C-corporations are taxed on
profits (income) or on turnover (gross receipts or sales), whichever tax
liability is greater. One of the neat things about supplementary turnover taxes
is that they implicitly raise the cost of jurisdiction shopping, by making it
cheaper for multi-state businesses to pay the higher Oregon CIT than for them
to pay turnover taxes in Oregon and pay CITs in other states, even where
those CIT rates are lower. Consequently, as a result of Measure 67, Oregon
business tax receipts were at least $60 million more in 2013 than they would
otherwise have been and, perhaps, as much as $114 million more. Furthermore,
the DOR’s core systems replacement effort, perhaps the most successful IT
project in the state’s history, vastly upgraded the state’s ability to monitor
business tax liabilities and to collect taxes. As a result, CIT receipts
increased by an estimated $45 million in 2013 over 2012. These are noteworthy
accomplishments. They deserve to be recognized.
Oregon’s Department
of Revenue attributes approximately $74 million of the $200 million missing
due to corporate tax sheltering and planning to single-factor apportionment. Before
tax year 1991, a corporation’s income was apportioned to Oregon by a
three-factor formula. The factors used in this formula were Oregon payroll relative
to total payroll in all states, Oregon property relative to total property, and
Oregon sales relative to total sales. These three percentages were equally weighted
to determine the apportionment percentage applied to total AGI of the
corporation. Since 2005, the apportionment percentage has been simply the ratio
of Oregon sales to total domestic sales.
While there is plausible
evidence that businesses manage these factors regardless of apportionment
percentages, most tax analysts believe that sales are somewhat easier to fiddle
than payroll or property. Hence, the nearly universal adoption of single factor
apportionment is often cited as one of the
reasons for the growing discrepancy between the BEA’s state profit totals and reported
state CIT bases. However, it makes sound
tax sense to apportion profits on sales rather than local employment or
investment. The proper response to the problem of tax base erosion is not to throw
the baby out with the bathwater, but to improve reporting, thereby making it
harder for businesses to hide sales or allocate them to low or no CIT states.
Michael Mazerov of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has
authored state
CIT disclosure legislation aimed at this problem. Oregon is one of several
states that have considered his proposal.
My own preference would be a federal law that extended IRS Form 1120, Schedule
M-3, to require state-by-state disclosure of the following information:
•
the nature of the corporation’s activities;
•
its sales;
•
its employees;
•
apportionment shares
•
income tax accrued;
•
credits, deductions, and exclusions; and
•
income tax expense on a state-specific basis.
And to require businesses to file the expanded M-3 along
with their state tax declarations. My best guess is that this would be worth
$50-$100 million in additional CIT revenue to Oregon each year. However, in the
absence of federal action, which seems very unlikely at this time, Oregon
should promptly enact Mazerov’s proposal into law.
