April 17, 2020
State and Local Tax
This Week
Illinois General Assembly
The House and Senate were not in session this week.
The committee deadline (the deadline for moving House and Senate bills out of committee to the floor in the chamber of origin) to April 24. The House extended the third reading deadline to May 8 and the Senate extended the third reading deadline for Senate bills to May 7.
It remains unclear when the General Assembly will return to Springfield.
Amendments
None this week
New legislation
None this week
COVID-19 state tax-related announcements
Earlier this week, I confirmed with the Illinois Department of Revenue's Acting General Counsel Brian Fliflet that the Department has not taken any action to extend the required time for protesting Notices of Tax Liability (sales tax), Notices of Deficiency (income tax), denials of claims for refunds, adverse decisions on requests for sales tax and property tax exemptions.
Brian advised that the Department recognizes that with many taxpayers and practitioners working from home, it may be difficult for practitioners to obtain signatures on Powers of Attorney required to be filed with protests. Brian encourages practitioners to file protests within the statutory deadlines, even if it has not been possible to obtain required signatures on Powers of Attorney. He committed that the Department will work with taxpayers on these types of issues.
City of Chicago
The due dates for the February, March, and April tax payments have been extended to Monday, June 1, 2020 for the taxes listed below:
Amusement tax (7510, 7510R, 7511)
Bottled Water tax (1904)
Checkout Bag tax (2737)
Ground Transportation tax (7595)
Hotel Accommodations tax (7520, 7520S)
Parking tax (7530, 7530V)
Restaurant tax (7525)
Also note that the announcement also provides that no additional interest will accrue from 3/17/2020 through 6/1/2020 on late tax payments for the periods July 2019 through January 2020.
Cook County
IRS
The Internal Revenue Service has established a
Coronavirus Tax Relief web page. Note that IRS IRS updated the page over the past week.
Rulemaking
The April 17 edition of the
Illinois Register
has not been posted online as of the finalization of this newsletter. I'll report on any tax-related rulemakings next week or in a special update later today if there is anything in the Illinois Register of immediate importance.
Court cases
No new tax-related decisions this week.
Tax Tribunal
No new decisions were issued this week.
New cases were filed with the Tribunal this week.
One of the new cases involves a protest of a Notice of Deficiency where the issue involves whether the Illinois net losses of a predecessor company - the taxpayer contends that pursuant to IITA Section 405 and Section 100.4500 of the Department's rules the company was entitled to use the Illinois net losses:
Publications and Announcements
I received a couple of questions this week about whether the partial forgiveness of loans under the federal Paycheck Protection Program would result in a cancellation of indebtedness subject to Illinois Income Tax liability. My understanding is that the short answer for Illinois is no because Illinois is a rolling conformity state and the loan forgiveness will does not trigger taxable income federally. The answer may be different in states that do not have rolling conformity with the Internal Revenue Code. The Tax Foundation has an
article on the multistate tax implications of this issue.
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