When it comes to wringing business taxes out of L.A.'s scofflaws, fly-by-nights and old-fashioned book-cookers, Bob Hertzberg wants to steal a page from Santa Clarita's playbook.
On the belief that you get more flies with honey than vinegar, Hertzberg proposes giving every Los Angeles business that pays its taxes a page on the city's website:
A few of the things I would do as Mayor include:
1. Supporting businesses that pay their taxes with a website where every business gets a page to advertise.
2. Giving business vehicles a sticker showing they’ve paid their tax. For businesses that cross city lines like deliveries and repairs, people should be able to see whether the business they’re patronizing is obeying the law.
3. Starting a “Buy LA” campaign to encourage residents to support businesses that pay their taxes.
L.A.'s been struggling with unpaid and underpaid business taxes for quite some time.
You may not know this, but the city is now empowered by law to spy on your state tax records to see if you're paying your fair share of city business taxes.
The city even encourages snitches to turn in scofflaws to the Assessor's office.
While Hertzberg's feel-good plan looks more likely to have an effect than the threat of surveillance, whistle-blowing and gotchas from the Assessor's office, he assumes a few things:
1. An ad on the city web site is worth something - and that people will browse through the site looking for businesses when so many vertical portals (Yahoo Yellow Pages, ;@LA, etc.) are doing a better job. And while ad recession is lightening up on the Web and in general local businesses aren't exactly flocking back to the medium to take advantage of its completely underrated power. They may not have enough faith in it yet.
2. People are really going to notice an "I paid my city taxes" sticker amid all the visual clutter and information overload we have to suck up every day just to get to work and home again without a major fender-bender. And that - even if they did - they'd read the fine print or notice this year's color to register whether someone was paid up.
3. The "Buy L.A. campaign" idea sounds nice in principle but - again - people don't have the bandwidth to factor this sort of thing into their buying decisions to a degree that would actually put the pinch on tax-dodging businesses. Furthermore, it's an open market. People may have effectively boycotted non-union grapes 20 or 30 years ago, but I doubt today they'd do much homework on their local bodega's business tax performance.
Call me cynical, but when viewed realistically at street level, the ideas would amount to a whole lot of smilin' and pomp for nothing. I think fear is a greater motivator, and we can expect city crackdowns to be more effective in collaring scofflaws so no one else has to pay an unfair share.
Posted by: mack_reed on Friday, August 13, 2004 - 04:27 PM
