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CHARLESTON -- A tax credit Gov. Jim Justice proposed earlier this week on the vehicle tangible personal property taxes residents and corporations pay to counties annually is receiving pushback from supporters of a constitutional amendment that would allow those same taxes to be eliminated in the future.
Justice announced the Car and All Vehicle Tax Elimination and Protection of Local Government Act during a live-stream event Tuesday. He said the act would provide a dollar-for-dollar refund on vehicle tangible personal property taxes paid to counties by providing rebates paid out of the general revenue budget.
"If (the Legislature) would tell me they're ready to go, tomorrow we could get rid of the car tax and rebate people their money," Justice said during a virtual briefing with press Friday from the State Capitol Building. "It could be done maybe in a matter of minutes."
The act was billed by Justice and Revenue Department Secretary Dave Hardy as a simple process, where eligible taxpayers would fill out a form and reimburse taxpayers for the vehicle axes paid to counties. But a draft bill released by the Governor's Office after Tuesday's announcement paints a different story.
In an interview for the Mountain State Views podcast Thursday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, said that Justice's vehicle tax credit plan was an "unchecked backdoor tax increase."
"If the state's going to turn around and reimburse for the tax you pay, what's to stop (county assessors) from jacking up that assessment entirely as high as they can get it so that this check you get is a bigger check, knowing that you're going to sit there and wait on the government to send you money back for the check you wrote," Tarr said.
"The other way that you actually have a potential tax increase with this is that the federal government would look at that as income to you," Tarr continued. "So, you still have to do federal income tax on top of what you do with the state income tax. At the same time, he's saying this is how he's going to get rid of the vehicle tax, but he's going to phase out the income tax. So, if there is no income tax, then where's the credit?"
Justice had no answers when asked about these specific issues Friday, accusing Amendment 2 supporters of making unsupported claims to oppose his vehicle tax credit.