From the Sterling Journal-Advocate (Jeff Rice):
Senate Bill 16-044 is scheduled for a hearing before the Colorado Senate Finance Committee on Feb. 9, according to the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling.
The bill would require the state to stop trying to collect back tax credits, penalties, and interest from landholders whose conservation easement appraisals have been summarily labeled “fraudulent” by the Department of Revenue. In an interview over the weekend, Sonnenberg said the largest obstacle the bill faces is the fiscal impact.
“The DOR has to compile those numbers and come up with a fiscal note, that is, what is the cost to the state of enacting that bill,” Sonnenberg said. “What that fiscal note will tell us is just how much we’ve screwed the people by breaking our contract with them.”
Across Colorado more than 700 conservation easements, most of them donated between 2003 and 2007, were created under a state law that for years had no oversight. Thousands of landowners set aside millions of acres of land in return for state tax credits they could use against their own income taxes or could sell for cash to others to help pay their income taxes. At last report, the state had lost as much as $220 million to those tax credits.
Subsequently, state officials summarily deemed hundreds of the land appraisals those credits are based on as fraudulent and the donated land as worthless. No one has ever been charged with fraud, let along convicted of it, in relation to any of those land appraisals.
Sonnenberg’s bill would forbid the DOR from “contesting certain claims for conservation easement claims unless the valuation of the easement is supported by an appraisal from an appraiser convicted of fraud or misrepresentation in connection with preparing the appraisal.”
The bill also calls for a refund of “tax, interest, or penalty paid by a taxpayer” in connection with a contested appraisal that otherwise would meet the bill’s requirements.
Sonnenberg acknowledged that the impact on the state’s coffers could be in the millions of dollars beyond what the DOR is already trying to collect…
The bill is scheduled for a Finance Committee hearing at 7 a.m. Feb. 9 in Room LSB B in the Capitol. Sonnenberg said anyone who wants to attend the hearing or even testify on its behalf can contact his office for assistance.