PEAK, a Kansas economic development incentive program, redirects employee income taxes back to the employing company.
An economic development incentive program in Kansas is PEAK, or Promoting Employment Across Kansas. This program allows companies to retain 95 percent of the payroll withholding tax of employees.
There are requirements regarding the minimum number of jobs to be created or retained. Also, companies must pay wages greater than or equal to the median county wage. 1
Then, the Secretary of Commerce has “discretion to approve applications of qualified companies and determine the benefit period.”
Legislators and public officials like programs like PEAK partly because they can promote these programs as self-financing. That is, the state isn’t subsidizing a company. Instead, the company is paying its own way with its own taxes (actually, its employees’ taxes). PEAK supporters say the state is not sending money to the company. Instead, the company is just holding on to 95 percent of its employees’ withholding taxes instead of sending the funds to the state.
Schemes like PEAK call into question one of the fundamental principles of taxation: That tax funds be used to fund the operations of government, not to enrich one particular person or company. But continually, states and local government use programs like PEAK — and others like tax increment financing (TIF) districts, Community Improvement Districts (CIDs), Industrial Revenue Bonds, and others — that turn over a public function to private interests.
Now, what about workers who are employed at a company that is in the PEAK program and who receive a state income tax refund? Their withholding taxes — 95 percent, anyway — have already been given back to their employer.
So: What is the source of the money used to pay these refunds? How much money is paid in refunds to employees working at PEAK-participating companies?
We should note that the funds don’t come from the PEAK company’s employees, as the employees receive credit for all their withholding taxes, even though 95 percent never contributed to the state treasury.
Inquiry to the Department of Revenue revealed that there are no statistics on actual income tax liability of PEAK employees vs. the amount of withholding tax credited to that employee that was retained or refunded to the PEAK employer. The Department of Commerce referred inquiries to the Department of Revenue.
If we wanted to know how much money was paid in refunds to PEAK-company employees, I believe we would need to examine the account of each affected employee. I’m sure it’s not possible to come up with an answer by making assumptions, because the circumstances of each taxpayer vary widely.
Whatever the amount, it represents state tax revenue being used to fund an economic development incentive program that is pitched as being self-funded.
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Notes
- “PEAK requires the qualified company to commit to creating five new jobs in non-metropolitan counties or ten (10) new jobs in the metropolitan counties of Shawnee, Douglas, Wyandotte, Johnson, Leavenworth and Sedgwick over a two-year period. The qualified company must also pay wages to the PEAK jobs/employees, that when aggregated, meet or exceed the county median wage or North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) average wage for their industry.” Kansas Department of Commerce. Promoting Employment Across Kansas (PEAK) Program. Available at http://kansascommerce.gov/141/Promoting-Employment-Across-Kansas-Progr. ↩