[Updated 3/6/13, see below] In a bitter contest over tax changes that could hit California investors with bills for up to $120 million in unpaid taxes dating back to 2008, one side has stopped the clock.
Under pressure from the office of California Gov. Jerry Brown, the state’s Franchise Tax Board indicated today that it will refrain, for now, from trying to collect income taxes that it believes thousands of taxpayers now owe under a 2012 court ruling that invalidated an important tax incentive for small-business investors.
Taxpayers and lobbyists opposed to the retroactive assessments are greeting the change with relief.
“This is certainly not a victory at all for our position, but it takes the time pressure off, and it takes the immediate financial hit that a lot of people were looking at off the table,” says Brian Overstreet, the Healdsburg entrepreneur who first sounded the alarm about the FTB’s retroactive tax in an Xconomy column in mid-January.
Overstreet and several other California businessmen are behind a group called California Business Defense that has spent the last three weeks petitioning Brown’s office to stop the FTB from sending the bills.
“I feel very grateful to the governor’s office, which, I think, has been instrumental in making this happen,” says Overstreet (pictured above right). “They certainly could have told us they had other things to deal with. It feels great, after spending way too much of my time on this for the last few weeks, to actually have something to show for it.”
What Overstreet’s group has won is a temporary reprieve, rather than a concrete change in the FTB’s position. Now Overstreet’s group and legislators opposed to the FTB’s plan say they’ll seek an administrative or legislative fix that restores the original tax incentive in some form or, at a minimum, prevents the FTB from issuing the retroactive assessments.
As we detailed in a January 24 analysis, the tax dispute has a long and twisted history. In the early 1990s, California legislators created a tax incentive designed to encourage investors to put their money into California-based small businesses. The so-called qualified small business stock (QSBS) incentive allowed investors to exclude 50 percent of their gains on the sale of small-business stock from their taxable income. If they rolled the money into another small business within 60 days, they could exclude 100 percent of the gains.
One key requirement was that the qualifying small businesses maintain 80 percent of their assets and payroll in California. In other words, the incentive wasn’t available to people who invested in multi-state companies—and in a case decided last August, a state court of appeals ruled that this part of the tax statute violated the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
In a notice issued on the final business day of December, 2012, the FTB declared that under its interpretation of the case, known as Cutler v. California Franchise Tax Board, the entire incentive statute was void. The FTB said everyone who had taken advantage of the QSBS incentive since 2008—the oldest tax year still open to new assessments—would have to pay taxes on the income they’d previously excluded.
To get in under the statute of limitations, the FTB said it would be forced to issue the first retroactive assessments by April 15, 2013. And in fact, it has already sent letters to some 2,000 taxpayers, warning them that a tax bill is on the way.
But today the FTB posted a set of changes to an online FAQ about QSBS gains, indicating that it won’t send a tax assessment to affected 2008 taxpayers for now, as long as they sign an agreement waiving the statute of limitations.
The FTB didn’t make clear how long the postponement would last. But it said taxpayers protesting their bills would have the “option to request that the protest be held pending legislative action.”
In effect, that stops the countdown on the 2008 assessments—and creates a lot more breathing room for taxpayers who were facing big retroactive increases in their 2009, 2010, 2011, or 2012 tax bills.
The approaching April 15 deadline was “a major issue” for opponents of the FTB’s policy, according to Overstreet, because “once those bills go out the state starts thinking about how it is going to spend the money, and then we are in a fight against much bigger organizations about
