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SPONSOR: |
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DATE TYPED: |
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HB |
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SHORT TITLE: |
Define “County” In Local Liquor Excise Act |
SB |
243 |
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ANALYST: |
Neel |
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REVENUE
Estimated Revenue |
Subsequent Years Impact |
Recurring or
Non-Rec |
Fund Affected |
|
FY03 |
FY04 |
|
|
|
|
$164.5 |
$329.0 |
Recurring |
|
|
$ 8.5 |
$17.0 |
Recurring |
TRD Administrative Fees |
|
|
|
|
|
(Parenthesis ( ) Indicate Revenue Decreases)
Relates to:
HB 350, Define “County”
In Local Liquor Excise Act
HB 579, Define
“County” In Local Liquor Excise Act
Responses
Received From:
Taxation
and Revenue Department (TRD)
Synopsis of Bill
Senate Bill 243 allows San Miguel county to impose a tax of up to 5 percent on the wholesale
value of liquor sold by retailers in the county.
The tax imposed by the Local Liquor Excise Tax
Act [
FISCAL
IMPLICATIONS
TRD anticipates provisions in HB 350 will
generate approximately $356.0 with $17.0 or 5 percent dedicated to TRD for
administering the program.
ADMINISTRATIVE
IMPLICATIONS
Administrative costs to the Department should be fairly
small since the bill only expands the tax to one county. The program would probably be implemented as
a manually-intensive system rather than a fully computerized system. TRD further notes that eventually an
additional FTE may be required to help administer the program.
OTHER
SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES
TRD
notes the following significant issues:
1)
2) The 1993 and 1994 liquor tax increases
resulted in no discernible effect on levels of alcohol consumption. The 128% increase in the tax on beer, for
example, amounted to about 13 cents per six-pack, or about 4% to 5% increase in
price. While the consumer "price
elasticity" response was projected to be about a 2% decline in
consumption, in hindsight the actual decline now appears to have been
significantly less than 2%.
3) Differences between the value-based Local
Option Liquor Tax and the volume-based state Liquor Excise Tax make
computerized audit cross-checks difficult.
The Department probably will not spend a lot of its limited audit
resources providing audit coverage for a local option liquor tax, especially if
it were at the expense of the more productive state and local gross receipts
tax.
4) Section
5) Creation or expansion of
local option taxes of this sort inhibit the ability of the state to
raise revenue from the same source. Approximately $37.7 million is currently
being raised by the state liquor excise tax, of which about $24.7 million is
general fund revenue and $13 million is distributed to the Local DWI Grant
Fund. An additional large portion of the
state general fund revenue from the state liquor excise tax could be considered
to be “taken-up” by continuing appropriations to the Health Department and the
DWI Program Fund for alcohol-related programs.
6) Statistical
information regarding the value of alcoholic beverages and their distribution
by county would be somewhat enhanced by expansion of the Local Liquor Excise
Tax. The state liquor excise tax is
collected at the distributor/wholesaler level. Since the disposition of the tax
revenues in no way depends on the geographic dispersion of ultimate sales, the
state Liquor Excise Tax does not generate information about patterns of local
sales on either a dollar or volume basis.
We are not aware of any other regularly reported source which does.
SN/ls:prr