2003 Senate Bill 824 ↩

House Roll Call 70: Passed

To ease the employee expansion/retention requirements for determining whether a firm qualifies for a MEGA credit, in such as way as to allow the state to offer a credit for two Federal-Mogul Corporation plants which do not currently qualify for a MEGA credit. The company has intimated that without cost saving measures it may close the plants. These measures often come in the form of targeted tax cuts and union concessions. The bill would also require a firm which receives a targeted MEGA tax credit in return for promising to create or retain a certain number of jobs, to pay back the tax savings if they fail to keep the jobs promise. It would expand a provision in MEGA that considers employees who are technically employed by another firm but are actually part of the workforce of a firm receiving MEGA tax credits (“leased employees”), to be counted in determining whether the firm qualifies for the credit under the employee expansion/retention requirements. The bill would allow firms with multiple sites to include employees at the different sites in meeting the expansion/retention requirements, and would liberalize the definition of high-technology businesses to make it easier for certain firms to qualify for tax credits. Note: The substance of the original bill is no longer included, because the changes it proposed have since become law as Public Act 248 of 2003, which was House Bill 5255. Instead, the bill is being used a legislative “vehicle” to make the changes to MEGA described above.