Molly Bougearel and Betsy Lassar, two members of a tax- reform group known as Progress Illinois, called for state political leaders to provide leadership on tax reform (Voice, May 27).
“What is needed . . . is the political will to tackle inadequacies of the current system with real solutions,” they wrote.
As the state’s chief fiscal-control officer, I, along with my staff, have worked hard in our first 100 days in office to identify ways to capture lost revenue in state government.
So often we hear of solutions that only identify new sources of revenue–i.e., tax hikes or new taxes–when we aren’t doing a good enough job of collecting the revenue that’s already out there from other sources, including the federal government.
In March I released a report that detailed $2.9 billion in money owed the state, many of those debts six months old and older.
The longer those debts go uncollected, the less incentive there is to go after them. I proposed a tougher law for those deadbeats. One such solution would even notify credit-rating agencies that those individuals in our state aren’t paying up.
And then in April our office documented the $3.3 billion in tax breaks Illinois gave away last year. They include the $750 million state tax exemption on food and drugs and the $309 million state individual income-tax exemption on retirement and Social Security payments.
What I have been stressing is that there are options for state government in trying to satisfy all the pressing revenue needs right now: past-due Medicaid bills, education and the need for more prison beds.
We have the leadership in Springfield to tackle these issues. The choices are there, we just need to make them.
