Entries for 'Tom Yamachika'

“...the coronavirus pandemic has challenged the County to make many unprecedented decisions. One such decision was to reduce the Assessed Values of Hotel and Resort properties due to the catastrophic drops in occupancy experienced by that industry....”

... Taxing Income in the New World of Teleworking ....

...“Landlords are subject to GET on these amounts whether the payments are received from the tenants or directly from the agency that administers the relief program on behalf of the tenant.”  The same reasoning applies to income tax, federal and state....

... Some taxpayers on Maui are getting a nasty surprise this year because they didn’t do anything, and their real property tax rate doubled ....

... Government should be based on clearly written laws, and not on the unpredictable will of one or even a few people ....

... House Bill 613, another bill that has undergone radical metamorphosis while in our Legislature. ...

... “Frankenbill” House Bill 58 has cleared the Legislature and is on the Governor’s desk waiting to become law ....

... Income tax is a complicated enough subject already ....

... For many years, the counties and the State have been bickering about how much support from the State’s transient accommodations tax (TAT) they should get ....

... and he pulls no punches ....

... the report spends lots of time reviewing the Auditor’s recent actions involving the Office of Hawaiian Affairs ....

... our lawmakers are not stopping at just one Frankenbill ....

... assembling bits and pieces from cadavers and then bringing it to life using some unexplained method ....

... SB815 creates a “public education stabilization trust fund” ....

“...Confiscation in Paradise: Move to Hawaii, pay the nation’s highest state income-tax rate....”

... a kind of crabs-in-the-bucket argument ....

... Senate Bill 56, with the ominous title “Relating to Revenue Generation,” has been granted its first hearing by the Senate Ways and Means Committee ....

... “I am altering the deal.  Pray I don’t alter it any further.” ....

... We need to start recognizing that this “dedicated funding source” rhetoric is taking us down the wrong path ....

... Hold on to your wallets, folks, because this year’s great legislative adventure has just begun! ....

"... At the Legislature, committee hearings have begun in earnest and it doesn’t seem at all like we are in an economic crisis ...."

... Our unemployment system, as of January 8, 2021, has paid out $3.4 billion in unemployment benefits ....

... Ige’s Chief of Staff and former Director of Taxation Linda Chu Takayama told the House Finance Committee a little more about the revenue enhancement measures (tax hikes) that the Administration is going to propose ....

... “the carbon tax” is most likely the “barrel tax” ....

... There is still a lot of real estate between $0.3 billion and $1.4 billion a year ....

... possible unintended consequences ....

... “The following specific provisions of law are suspended, as allowed by federal law … Chapter 89, HRS, collective bargaining in public employment.” ....

... Developments during this COVID crisis have brought out tax scofflaws in some of the most unexpected ways ....

... The first problem is that some people think that the letter comes from a government agency. It doesn’t ....

...“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”....

... In a case called Timbs v. Indiana decided just last year, however, the U.S. Supreme Court made a couple of key points ....

...B&F basically told the departments, “Here’s your money. Go spend it.”....

...$2.28 billion within 257 accounts....

... The proposal is called Bill 80 ....

... the Governor issued a Fourteenth Supplementary Proclamation, in which the language suspending the Procurement Code was radically changed ....

...we have a state budget hole of more than 2 billion dollars....

...An accounting firm can’t arrest people, throw them in jail, or otherwise find that they have committed illegal activity....

...an example of leadership in the face of the COVID-19 crisis....

We are feverishly trying to spend federal dollars for the common good....

...The bill addresses the appearance of corruption....

...The governors zeroed in on two principal drivers of our government’s response, namely structural capability and leadership....

... The Auditor was supposed to start on the first chunk last year and finish the report before the start of the 2020 legislature, but ....

... “They have to be trained on what we do." --Dr. Sarah Park .…

...I’m not the only one trying to dig up information on where the money went....

...having to forgo, or pay back, a bunch of that money is not going to be a happy thing....

...Now that the economy is down and tax revenues are in the tank, we are now seeing cases of our Department of Taxation using some particularly nasty provisions in the tax code....

...In the meantime, the unemployed need to survive without any plus-up at all....

...employers are likely to be hit with a significant and automatic rate increase at the end of this year....

...Tax Foundation of Hawaii, urged the Legislature to adopt key provisions of the CARES Act although it became law in 2020. DoTAX, in testimony, proposed to adopt a few provisions and leave others on the cutting room floor....

...For tax benefits, the pendulum has started swinging in the other direction as well....