On January 10, 2017, California Assembly member Phil Ting introduced and read Assembly Bill (“AB”) 102 for the first time. Introduced as a placeholder bill, AB 102 consisted of a single section and sentence: “SECTION 1. It is the intent of the Legislature to enact statutory changes relating to the Budget.”
Then, in less than two weeks in June 2017, the California Legislature gutted and amended this innocuous bill into a 19-page plan to drastically alter the landscape of California’s tax system. As signed by the governor, AB 102 stripped the California State Board of Equalization of all but its constitutional powers, created a new agency named the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration, and created a second new agency named the Office of Tax Appeals. Three months later, clean-up legislation in AB 131 made further changes.
In his article for the January 2018 edition of the Journal of Multistate Taxation and Incentives, Eversheds Sutherland attorney Eric Coffill discusses the history and events leading up to those changes and provides a glimpse of the (somewhat uncertain) California tax landscape going forward.