Revenue & Taxation- House
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Representative Joe Jett
Unverified
0:00
Nice to be with you to join us at Reverend Untax today. Appreciate that. Okay, we're going to kick this off real quick. Won't be here very long. If you've got any questions, just feel free to stop what we're doing and just ask questions and clarification. First thing I want to tell for the new members, appreciate the new members here. We've got several folks who've been here for several years on this committee and several new folks, so congratulations on your election. Congratulations for coming to Reverend Untax. We have the most fun of any committee in the whole session. during the whole whole thing so that's that's not true so anyway first thing i want to tell
y'all is is whenever we gavel in you know we gavel in for a reason to start the meeting but more importantly is if you see that camera up there and this camera right here when we gavel in that starts the live streaming process and i can assure you that uh that several years ago i had my vice not not this guy but i had another vice chairman here and he was sitting here and And we gaveled in, and Representative Collins at the time made the motion for recess because they were going to try to get some votes or something or other.
So we recessed the meeting, and Joe Farrar was my co-chair at the time, and he was talking about somebody. And Representative Ease was in Florida on vacation. Representative Ease is on vacation laying at the beach. And he texts me. He says, we can hear everything that Joe Farrar is saying because his microphone was on and it was going out over live stream. So my point is when you're in a committee and somebody gavels in
and they get this, then the folks upstairs, that's their cue to turn the live streaming on. So if you're talking and the microphone's on, it's being streamed out to the wide world web. So y'all pay attention to that. But let's just go around the room real quick, introduce yourselves. I'm representing Joe Jett, District 56, Clay County, Randolph County, Green County. Howard
Speaker 5
2:07
Beatty, District 9, Ashley 3 County. Rick Flores, District 26, portions of Putt, Spring, and Garland County.
Speaker 6
2:14
John Milligan, District 53, Eastern Cricket County. Jack, go ahead. Jack Fortner, District 99,
Speaker 11
2:26
Marion, Parchabone, Baxter, and Serson. Can
Speaker 12
2:32
everybody hear everybody without using the mics?
Speaker 18
2:50
Okay, go ahead, please. Okay, hold up just a second. I've been told
Representative Joe Jett
Unverified
3:08
We're not on a microphone. So everybody, please start using your mics.
Representative Lane Jean
Unverified
3:24
Go ahead, Lane. Lane Jean, District 2, parts of Columbia, Lafayette, and Miller County. Monty Hodges,
Speaker 26
3:34
District 55, Mississippi County, and parts of Crittman County. Les Eves, District 46, Searcy, Arkansas.
Speaker 28
3:42
Ron McNair, District 98, parts of Boone and Carroll
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
3:47
County. Robin Lundstrom, Siloam Springs, Elm Springs, Tawny Town,
Speaker 30
3:52
and Springdale. Lane Fite, District 23, Saline County.
Representative Joe Jett
Unverified
3:55
And would staff please introduce yourselves? We have a brand new staff member this year. I don't know what it is about revenue and tax. We've done this five sessions now, and I've had like 20. I don't know what's going on, but we had like 20 analysts here. It might be, but go ahead, Brandon. Brandon Smith, legislative analyst. Ladies, you care to introduce yourself? I'm Carly. I'm Sherry Thomas, and I'm just helping out Brandon. and i'm telling y'all for the new members the staff is really what makes this thing go i mean
they they they make jack fortner look good which is a hard hard sale so but yeah but i'm telling y'all uh staff is great and don't hesitate to lean on staff marty starting at marty garrity all the way down these folks are top-rate individuals and they take what they do very serious. Over to my left is DF&A, and they brought some other folks down also, but Paul, would
Speaker 34
4:52
you introduce your team, please? Paul Gehring, I'm the Assistant Revenue Commissioner for DFA. I'm essentially the Chief Counsel for DFA on the revenue
Speaker 36
5:03
side. Charlie Collins, I'm the Revenue
Commissioner. So the first thing I want to do is just congratulate everybody on your elections. it's always an interesting thing that people don't realize some
Speaker 37
5:13
groups have to run every two years whether they want to or not and obviously people in the house do that so congratulations to all of you whether you were opposed or unopposed it's a big deal to win an election
Speaker 36
5:27
so congratulations and as Representative Jett and Mr. Chairman mentioned we brought a couple of our folks with us and one of the reasons is I remember when I was in the legislature it was always
like you know who's over there and so hopefully this can help put some faces with some names so if it's okay mr absolutely what i'd like to do is introduce each person have him or her take the mask off just so you can see them and then uh share a little bit about their background and then we'll kind of go from there so to kind of help as we get ready to do that in the revenue division we cover several different areas uh the the sros or dmds as a lot of people call them that's That's one big area. Child Support Enforcement is another big area.
But the folks that we've got here today are from what I'm going to call our tax side of our house. And there are three different groups. There's the auditing group. There are sales and excise taxes. There are income taxes, which includes corporate and personal. And then there's a new division that was brought into DF&A as part of transformation called ACD, the Assessment Coordination Division. They work a lot with the counties and are very focused on property and personal property types of taxes. So those are the leaders of the organizations that we've got there.
So what I want to do is I want to start with income tax. So Eileen, if you would introduce yourself first, please stand up. And then Autumn, if you would go second, and
Speaker 16
6:55
then we'll go to the next group. So this is Eileen at Income Tax. Hi, I'm Eileen Henderson.
Speaker 42
7:01
I've been to CFA now 31 years. so what she
Speaker 36
7:08
means by that is our title for the boss is administrator so Eileen is new as the
boss but she's worked in 30 years in taxes and many years in income tax deep background and experience there she's also got experience in other tax areas like tax credits on things like consent is and things of that nature. Autumn, do you want to stand up and introduce yourself,
Speaker 44
7:30
please? Sure. Autumn Haskell, and I've been with the Department of Finance and Administration
Speaker 16
7:35
for approximately 10 years. I have not been an individual income tax. I
Speaker 47
7:39
originally started an individual income tax as a
Speaker 16
7:41
manager. I'm the assistant administrator to Eileen for over all of the individual income taxes.
I recently would have been budget and previous to that I was in intergovernmental services. I
Speaker 36
7:55
was very excited to be able to bring Autumn back into the income tax side of the house after she really broadened that base with things like understanding the budget side of the house. So she's got a good hand on the complexities. The next group I want to go to is our, is Deanna behind over there? Is excise and sales tax. Deanna, if you'd please come in where the folks can see you. so one of our most complex sets of taxes is is is this all other group sales
taxes lottery taxes tobacco taxes and just a host of things like that Deanna could you please come a little bit more behind that
Speaker 49
8:36
big post thank you very much so if you would introduce yourself please
Speaker 36
9:00
he was perhaps one of the most knowledgeable people 47
years with the fna he retired this fall and and we promoted deanna into into tom's role next what i'd like to talk about is field audit so it's not only the auditing side of the house but they also do collections so lynn if you please stand up and introduce yourself uh and and this group does both the auditing side as well as the collection side
Speaker 56
9:43
Thank you Linda Lynn's also ran a small business before she came
Speaker 36
10:02
both sides of defense from an understanding standpoint next Sandra if you please stand up introduce yourself and Sandra
we were fortunate enough to be able to hire her she was an assessor out in the counties and we brought her into headquarters she was gracious enough to make the move and literally move her family here to Little Rock to
Speaker 61
10:29
join us this past summer as the administrator or the leader the boss if you will of the ACD unit. So
Speaker 62
10:37
Sandra, can you introduce yourself, please? Good morning. I'm Sandra Collier. I am the new
Speaker 63
10:41
director of the technical education division. I'm the newbie for BFNA, but I have been in the property tax business for over
20 years. I was the county assessor in Columbia from 2011 until July of 2020. I'm very excited about my new role, very excited to see Lane Jean sitting up there in the hometown. So you're about the only person excited to see
Representative Joe Jett
Unverified
11:02
Lane Jane, I can assure you. Oh, it's always good to see people back home,
Speaker 54
11:12
but I want you to know that I'm here to help you, and if you ever have a question or want to discuss anything about property tax, please call me.
Speaker 36
11:20
I was very excited this year. As you know, one of the things we do at ACD is get out to all of the assessors the values for things like motor vehicles, cars, and all of those things. And as some of you may know, we've had a few bumps last year getting some of that done. But if I'm not mistaken, nobody's had any problems with the counties or anybody in your county. As I understand it, I think this year we got that stuff taken care of in the fastest, most accurate that we've been able to do recently.
So I'm just real excited about the great leadership strengths that Sandra's bringing to our team. We have a very strong team in ACD, likewise everywhere else, but her leadership, I think, is going to be a real helpful piece. And, again, having seen the other side, she understands, you know, all of the different aspects of this. The final thing, and this is really, it's your person, Paul, so I'll let you introduce her. But I just want, as Paul gets ready to do it, I just want to say I'm just really, really excited. This is probably our newest promote in the revenue side of the business. And, Paul, if you'd like to introduce her.
Speaker 35
12:26
a new senior counsel in our last session. Joel DePippa was in that role. Joel transitioned to an attorney position within Revenue Legal.
Speaker 34
12:34
Alicia has been with us since 2017 as an attorney, as an attorney supervisor, but we're glad to have Alicia aboard. This is her second official day in her current job, so we're glad to have Alicia aboard. Alicia, please introduce yourself to the committee.
Speaker 66
12:50
Hi, everyone. I'm Alicia Austin Smith. I've been an attorney for more than a decade now.
I did a lot of that work in private practice before I came to DFA. As Paul mentioned, I've been in the future almost four years now, but I am on day two of my job. Currently operating my computer from the floor. So I'm very excited to start seeing your council and in that senior council role this session, and I'm a big part of the retreat. So I look forward to working with
Representative Joe Jett
Unverified
13:19
you all. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Don't ever hesitate to reach out to these guys. DFA's they do great work for us and we slam them pretty hard during this
community everything all the bills comes through we ask for everything to have a fiscal impact and that's not house rules it's just kind of our own internal rules we don't want to run any bills in here without making sure there's some type of a fiscal impact because we don't want to do anything any any damage to the budget of the state of Arkansas so no matter how bad or how we'll have a lot of colleagues will file bills and we've been doing this for several sessions now and what i found is probably on average and paul and charlie correct me if i'm wrong but i
think they're going to back me up on this we have just about a billion dollars a billion with a b a billion dollars worth of tax cuts tax credits tax implications to our budget so obviously we cannot let all those bills out and nobody wants to vote against a tax cut bill so what we do is is I work hard with our colleagues to say, listen, you know, this bill's probably not going to go anywhere. And a lot of times the colleagues say just, you know, sometimes they want to run the bill
because they have a constituent back home that wants to run a bill, knowing they might not get a vote or knowing, you know, the bill's going to go down in flames. But basically what we try to do is we try to work hard with our colleagues to, I don't want to say to hold the bills, but to just try to prioritize the spending until Chairman Lane Jean, he chairs the budget committee, until we actually get our hands wrapped around how much money that we can turn loose. And like last session, we had Representative John Payton had his car tag bill.
I can't remember what the cost of the bill was, but bottom line, it had like 75 bill sponsors, I mean co-sponsors on the bill. So obviously it had overwhelming support. so stuff like that we'll try to you know we'll go ahead and let out of the community but we try to work hard trying to keep airline just trying to just just held up in a responsible manner as much as possible without doing damage to the state until we find out exactly how much money the state has to where we're not really you know doing a lot of damage so so right out of the gate what we do is
we'll ask for fiscal impacts and then we'll disseminate fiscal impacts out to all the members And we've always kind of done something a little bit different than most communities. What I usually do, and one reason why I've asked for your cell phone numbers is, two days before we actually have a committee meeting, I will get with the bill sponsors and see what bills that we can run, what bills that's got support, the speaker's office, supporting the governor's, whoever's supporting it. And then I will text those bills out to you guys two days prior,
and I'll text them out actually to DFA as well. And the reason why I do that is because right now I think there's probably close to 20, 30 bills out there in this committee. And nobody wants to be sitting around reading 20, 30 bills every night on tax, and some of this stuff is pretty hard. So what I try to do is to help alleviate the pain of that, if you will, is I'll just text out two days in advance what we're going to be taking a look at on what days.
and there'll be some days we get accused of never meeting. Well, that's not true. We probably meet once or twice a session. That's kind of a joke you guys can laugh, but we do meet more than never, which we get accused of. And we'll just come in and take care of business. We meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We're going to meet 10 minutes upon adjournment, Tuesdays and Thursdays. If we don't meet, we'll send out a text saying we're not going to meet. If we meet, we'll send out a text with a bill saying we're going to meet.
And that will come from my vice chair, Jack Fortner, or myself. You've got to have a quorum to meet. So 11 people's got to show up to have a quorum. So please, if you can be here, be here. I recognize the fact that everybody gets busy. And towards the end of the session, everybody gets busier. And everybody's trying to run their bills, trying to take care of their own business. So sometimes it's just hard to get the 11. So towards the end of the session, like right now, it's not that big of a deal. everybody's going to show up towards the end of session if you cannot be here please just give
myself or jack fortner a heads up because last thing we want to do is come in here and have three people here and we can't run the bill and we got people all over arkansas coming in thinking they're going to testify for a bill that we're never going to run because we don't have a quorum so please give myself or jack a heads up when everybody starts getting busy and you got you guys you guys will know when that will be i mean like right now like i said most people's going to show up but I can promise you like three weeks before the end of the session it's hard to get a quorum
sometimes so please just give us a heads up if you have an amendment on a bill please just out of courtesy to us if somebody's running the bill and and sometimes we have hostile amendments believe it or not so just as a courtesy to us and to staff please give us a heads up that if you're going to have an amendment on somebody else's bill or even have an amendment to your own bill to make sure that we the staff has the proper um um just everything in place this is
the logistic to be able to run this amendment so please take care of that and just be respectful to your uh other co-members or your other colleagues um whether members or not members of the committee um jack am i missing something no i don't think you hit it all okay do you want say something? Okay. Does anybody have any questions? Did I pretty
Speaker 22
19:07
much it at all? You guys good? Okay. Well, you
Speaker 70
19:11
guys, anybody have any questions? Well, with that, we're adjourned.
Speaker 72
19:20
Mr. Chairman, we're going to keep cards in case anybody... Thank
Representative Joe Jett
Unverified
19:25
you, thank you. If anybody wants one of Charlie Collins' cards, They're right here up front, we'll grab one.
Agenda
No agenda available.
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — REVENUE & TAXATION- HOUSE, Jan 12, 2021 | Agenda | 1 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Representative Joe Jett
Unverified
Speaker 5
Speaker 6
Speaker 11
Speaker 12
Speaker 18
Speaker 21
Representative Lane Jean
Unverified
Speaker 26
Speaker 28
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
Speaker 30
Speaker 34
Speaker 36
Speaker 37
Speaker 16
Speaker 42
Speaker 44
Speaker 47
Speaker 49
Speaker 51
Speaker 56
Speaker 58
Speaker 61
Speaker 62
Speaker 63
Speaker 54
Speaker 35
Speaker 66
Speaker 22
Speaker 70
Speaker 72