NEWS

Budget cuts slow handling of Miss. income tax returns

Emily Wagster Pettus
Associated Press

JACKSON - A second round of midyear budget cuts took place just as the Mississippi Department of Revenue was swamped with thousands of individual income tax filings.

David Snow, an auditor with the Mississippi Department of Revenue, sorts a stack of tax returns along with other auditors, revenue officers, and customer service agents, who have been pressed into doing the clerical work of the 35 temporary workers who were laid off by the department in the Clinton, Miss., offices, Tuesday, May 3, 2016.

Because of the cuts, the department had to send home 35 temporary workers it had hired to open mail because it couldn’t afford to keep them, agency spokeswoman Kathy Waterbury said Tuesday.

Other employees of the department are working extra hours to open the returns that have arrived since the April 18 deadline to file individual income taxes, she said. That includes auditors, revenue officers and customer service agents.

RELATED: State agencies pondering cuts, layoffs

“Every last one of us will be doing some time in the mail room and doing key punch,” Waterbury told The Associated Press.

Waterbury said employees have worked Saturday and after normal business hours on weekdays to try to catch up.

“I’ve got the paper cuts to prove it,” she said.

The Department of Revenue’s budget started at $73.4 million for the year that began July 1. It has been cut nearly $1.1 million. Waterbury said that in addition to laying off the temporary workers, the department has reduced travel for revenue-producing employees.

“It was either that or furlough employees,” she said.

RELATED: Budget cuts will hurt counties, MEMA says

Gov. Phil Bryant trimmed budgets for most state agencies in January and April because tax collections have fallen short of expectations because of a sluggish state economy.

Legislators in recent years have tried to pump more money into the Department of Revenue, reasoning it was a good investment to spend money on the agency that collects taxes for state government.

The deadline for filing corporate taxes was in mid-March, and Waterbury said department employees have processed most of those. She said the department has about “10 humungous buggies” of paper forms for individual tax returns to open and process.

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Scanned state tax forms are set aside in sets, Tuesday, May 3, 2016, at the Clinton, Miss., office of the Mississippi Department of Revenue.

Because of the slowdown in opening and processing individual tax returns, state tax collections fell short of projections in April, but the numbers should pick up in May as more of that work is completed, Waterbury said.