The tax code shouldn’t pick winners and losers, and businesses performing the same service should face the same rules, ABA Chairman Ken Burgess wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal. The letter was in response to a Dec. 5 article highlighting the fact that credit unions were left out of the tax reform bill.
“At a time when Congress is asking everyone from teachers to homeowners to give up tax breaks in the name of lowering rates, why is the trillion-dollar credit-union industry still getting a free ride?” wrote Burgess, chairman of FirstCapital Bank of Texas in Midland, Texas.
Burgess added that today’s credit unions look nothing like those of the 1930s, when Congress first exempted credit unions from federal income tax and noted that there are now 282 credit unions with more than $1 billion in assets.
Burgess wrote: “It’s time for Congress to end the uneven playing field and require the nation’s billion-dollar credit unions to pay their fair share.”
Read the letter to the editor (subscription required).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The aba and icba couldn’t sell water in the desert.
ReplyDeleteThis is a No BRAINER.
Bet the 258 are almost all of the revenue of the industry.
Get most/all the revenue and leave the remaining 5000 out of it.
If they get over 1B, they immediately become a bank. Easy. So easy maybe even congress could do it.
a bank.
That’s what a lot of the smaller credit unions have been saying.
ReplyDeleteThe large CUs want expansive fields of members and no cap on members business loans and are 1billion or more. They pay their managers better than most bank managers. Some are using Association’s to add members in multiple states.
They acquire banks and want secondary capital.
Why shouldn’t they be taxed like banks?
Leave us alone though. We are still a simple credit union without much roa anyway.
Why would banks pay dues to aba or icba.
ReplyDeleteBlah, blah, blah! This rhetoric is old and tired.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, credit unions do pay many taxes and fees, among them payroll and property taxes; but, big or small, the tax exemptions they do have come from being member owned, democratically operated, not for profit organizations. There are no stock holders making millions at the expense of their customers. The defining characteristics of a credit union, no matter what the size, remain the same today as they did in 1934.
Secondly, according to the FDIC, there are currently 2,200 financial institutions or bank holding companies in this country organized as S corporations, providing bank owners with plenty of tax exemption benefits. Is this not concerning to Chairman Burgess?
Thirdly, if credit unions' tax advantage is so great, why aren't there more banks giving up their for profit status in exchange for credit union charters?