Tax Double Whammy

Sorry I can't let this go by just one more slice out of my conversation with Colorado State Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg regarding the tax credit boondoggle that left so many God-fearing, hard-working and honest ranchers and farmers either bankrupt or close to it. It wasn't just the taxes, penalties and back debt from the Department of Revenue. “Many of these farmers and ranchers who received these tax credits, they were marketable tax credits so they could sell them to somebody else and somebody else could gain value on those by paying 80, 85, $.90 on the dollar, whatever that may be, so they received the value for the tax credit which was part of the process and part of the agreement. Then when the Department of Revenue decided that they were not going to allow these tax credits several years later, the people who bought these tax credits, many were neighbors. Neighbors of the farmers and ranchers that they bought them from. They had no other choice but to sue the farmers and ranchers to try and get that value back and they felt terrible about trying to get their value back but had no other option and forced many of these farmers and ranchers who had already put that money back into their rancher utilized that money years before when they got the value of that tax credit, it forced them into bankruptcy. It's one of those deals where the Department of Revenue made arbitrary decisions and then piled onto those arbitrary decisions to try and cover up or fix those arbitrary decisions and then the Legislature stepped in to try and help fix those.”