West Cook News

With a group of Illinois lawmakers floating the idea of eliminating business tax incentives, the Illinois Chamber of Commerce is pushing back to try to keep the incentives in place.

Todd Maisch, Illinois Chamber president, recently told WGEM that the incentives are important to the state’s small businesses already hit hard by the economic crisis created by COVID-19 restrictions. He presented, as an example, the retailers discount, which enables retailers to keep a small portion of their sales tax collections in order to compensate them for collecting the tax.

Those small incentives help small businesses, which are already in decline due to state restrictions that have forced many to close their doors permanently. Maisch told WGEM that Illinois has already lost somewhere in the neighborhood of a third of its small businesses to the crisis.

"As I talk to my counterparts in other states, they're looking at 35 to 40 percent," he was quoted as saying by WGEM.

Yet, Maisch also noted that this is not the first time legislators have played with the idea of taking away the tax incentives from small businesses, according to WGEM. The concept seems to come up in the Legislature at least once a year.

"I'm confident we will be successful in convincing the legislature that's not the way to go," he was quoted as saying by WGEM.

Chris Taylor, a co-owner of For Home and Her in Quincy, told WGEM that he knows business owners all over the country and in Quincy who have been struggling, and that some of that struggle could be lessened if lawmakers took greater interest in the needs specific to small businesses.

"And one of those things is really considering what taxes we can alleviate on small businesses and how we can rework the checkbook basically as a state to be able to serve our small business while taking care of our debts and the things we're responsible for," he was quoted as saying by WGEM.