Response to the NFIB Business Fee Challenge

 

By now, many of you saw the recent court challenge filed by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB). The suit challenges my office’s use of business filing fees to subsidize elections costs under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR).

 

The NFIB specifically requests that I set our business fees to only fund my Business Division and refuse to fund elections. It’s important to know that the legislature controls the purse strings and I am legally obligated to meet the budget set by the legislature.

 

I’m sympathetic to its concerns and have shared those same concerns with the state’s legislature. Specifically, I recently told the legislature’s Joint Budget committee that sending nearly $2.5 million in business filing fees to Colorado counties to defray their elections cost was “a dead bang loser in court.”

 

For years, some of my predecessors have expressed the same concerns and requested that the legislature use taxpayer funds to pay for elections, instead of fees paid by businesses and non-profits. But due to tight budgets and precedence, the legislature never took action, and instead continued to impose this obligation on my office.

 

To help lessen the burden on our businesses and non-profits, I stood up to the legislature’s attempts to sweep my office’s business fees. Instead, I’m reinvesting those dollars back into the business community. Since then, we created our Business Efficiency Suite to make filings easier and more efficient. Chances are you’ve already started seeing these enhancements deployed with improvements in website design and usability. Coming in 2015, you’ll be able to consolidate all of your business filings into one month and file all of your annual reports at once, so you’ll spend less time on our web site and more time growing your businesses.

 

Additionally, we designed and deployed an online UCC filing system making filing and searching these lien documents faster and more accessible. The new system even received international praise from the International Association of Commercial Administrators when we received a Merit Award. Further, we licensed this software for other states and countries to use, which will net our office $1 million in revenue.

 

And we’ve implemented all these improvements while still giving back more than $5 million in fee holidays and preserving the lowest fees in the country.

 

We look forward to discussing this issue in court and having a judge resolve it.

 

Thank you for your contributions to Colorado and Happy Holidays.

 

Scott Gessler