It is no secret that tax incentives are commonly offered to businesses in exchange for job creation and community development. It is lesser known, however, that tax incentives serving a similar purpose are also offered to owners of residential property. Community Reinvestment Areas, or “CRAs,” are designated areas within municipalities or unincorporated county areas that local governments designate as neighborhoods containing housing facilities or structures of historical significance and where “new construction” is discouraged. The underlying goal of establishing a CRA is to revitalize, rehabilitate, and remodel existing structures within the boundary of the CRA. Ohio currently has over 400 cities, townships, and villages with established CRAs. Read More

County Auditors in Ohio are permitted to collect a fee for the administration related to the transfer of deeds.  There are two elements to the “real estate conveyance fee” (which is also commonly referred to as the “real estate transfer tax”).  R.C. 319.54 levies a fee that is measured as 10 cents of every 100 dollars of the value of the real property transferred.  Counties, under R.C. 322.02, are also given the authority to levy an additional real estate transfer tax of up to 30 cents per one hundred dollars of value (grand total of maximum fee/tax of 40 cents of every 100 dollars of value of real property transferred; or, denoted as a decimal 0.004).  Read More

In NASCAR Holdings, Inc. v. Testa, decided December 21, 2017, the Ohio Supreme Court held that the filing of a notice of appeal with the Ohio Board of Tax Appeals (“BTA”) by an attorney not licensed in Ohio did not deprive the BTA of jurisdiction over the appeal.  The Court followed the plurality opinion in Jemo Assoc., Inc. v. Lindley, 64 Ohio St.2d 365 (1980), which reversed the BTA’s dismissal of the appeal because it was filed by a corporate accountant.  Jemo stated that the proper inquiry in determining whether the notice of appeal invoked the BTA’s jurisdiction is whether the person who filed the notice of appeal was authorized by the taxpayer to file the appeal. Read More

Yesterday, February 21, 2018, Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge David E. Cain denied the request for a preliminary injunction from the municipal group that is comprised of more than 160 municipalities. The language of the decision has yet to be published. Zaino Hall & Farrin LLC will provide a more detailed analysis once the language is available.

This decision puts to rest, for now, an effort by municipalities to forestall the state’s centralized collection of tax on behalf of municipalities, as well as keeps in place the elimination of the anti-competitive municipal throwback rule for years beginning in
2018. A hearing on a permanent injunction is scheduled for December 2018. Read More

During the biennium budget process in 2015 Ohio House and Senate leaders crafted a study commission to look deeper into tax items outside of the budget process. The reason was that the budget is a hurried process with a definitive time frame and getting in-depth into forward looking tax policy issues was often too time consuming for the budget process. Since its creation, the 2020 Tax Policy Study Commission (“Study Commission”) has been meeting on several topics and last week issued a report to the General Assembly on the feasibility of moving Ohio from a progressive personal income tax to a flat rate personal income tax.  Read More