Thursday, January 20, 2011

Sorry I didn’t get a post up yesterday but it was “one of those days”. What I mean is that there were too many things happening at the same time. That usually results in my not getting to any of them. But yesterday I did get to a meeting with our new Tax Commissioner, VBA member Mary Peterson. Liam Murphy and Jim Knapp came to Montpelier to discuss issues with the new electronic PTTR. They essentially asked for a delay in implementation and a return to the pre January 1 fillable PDF, proposing an April 1 date for conversion. I’m not sure what the response will be but, frankly, I didn’t get the impression that Tax Dept. was interested in doing that. They also raised the “good faith estimate” issue and the $5 fee, a fee which many of on the Property Law Section list serve are struggling with. The Commissioner said the department didn’t do a good enough job at rolling out the new form and called for an ongoing “advisory committee” of sorts to get feedback as the department moves further into online forms. I tried to analogize this problem with the roll out of electronic filing now ongoing in the civil divisions of the Rutland and Windsor Units. We also offered to do another training on the ePTTR at the VBA Mid Year Meeting on March 18th. It occurred to me that family law practitioners may not have yet been exposed to the new practice and may bump into a wall when the time comes to transfer real estate as part of the resolution of a case. They’ll be in attendance at the Hilton in March and can avail themselves of the training as well.


Anyway, while doing that I did miss a presentation of the Blue Ribbon Tax Structure Commission’s report to the Senate Finance Committee. I also missed the initial testimony on H. 21, the Uniform Limited Cooperative Association Act. Testimony on both will continue today. The House Commerce Committee, having passed the ULCA bill last year, hopes to vote it out tomorrow afternoon. please pay special attention to the Tax Report as it does recommend extending the sales tax to services, including legal services. The link to the report is in Tuesday’s blog post. Read it; understand it; and be prepared to be asked to dissuade your legislator from supporting it.

Today H. 79 was introduced in to the House. You can read it here. it is the uniform adult guardianship and protective proceedings jurisdiction act. It’s been introduced before with no action ever taken. The VBA Board has endorsed it and it is supported by the Elder Law Section and the Probate and Trust Law Section. We wil continue to try to get the bill a hearing.

Thanks for reading.