BPOL relief is crucial for county

The mixed signals of our strug­gling economy were under­scored once again this week when the government reported that employers added 244,000 new jobs in April. That sounds good, of course, and it is somewhat more than experts were predicting — except when that other monthly survey simultaneously noted the official unemployment rate had inched back up to 9 percent.

Those stubbornly persistent jobless numbers are even worse when we con­sider those who have stopped looking for jobs altogether are not taken into account, and those millions of former full-time workers filling part-time jobs also are ignored in the official statis­tics.

Keeping this troubling scenario mind, if we wanted to actually make up a tax scheme that would somehow further hurt small businesses in Prince William and vicinity and be unfair at the same time, it would be hard to find a levy more fitting— more regressive or more counter-intuitive — than the Business Professional Occupational License tax.

Nearly half the counties in the com­monwealth, and more than three dozen cities, are, like Prince William and Manassas, currently plagued by some form of BPOL tax which, oddly, imposes taxes on businesses based on gross revenues— not profits (if any).

This simple-minded approach for raising revenue often results in asking small businesses that have actually lost money in the previous calendar year to cough up a few thousand dol­lars in BPOL taxes anyway. Talk about adding insult to injury.

Fortunately, Prince William County’s Board of Supervisors continues work­ing to lessen BPOL’s burden on busi­ness owners. While the current bench­mark for BPOL tax eligibility in Prince William is $100,000 in annual gross revenue, in the 2012 county budget the board favors raising that threshold to $200,000. That doesn’t exactly elimi­nate the burden on struggling busi­nesses, but it seems to us to go a long way toward at least helping businesses invest in their future growth and not get “BPOL-ed out of business” alto­gether.

Board Supervisor Marty Nohe and Chairman Corey Stewart have been singled out for their BPOL reform efforts by the Prince William Cham­ber of Commerce, which represents more than 2,000 local businesses and professional in the county. And the Manassas budget includes raising the threshold to $150,000 there.

We add our own praise and sup­port for any movement that leads to reducing the burden of the BPOL tax on Prince William and Manassas and Manassas Park merchants (which by the way, includes this very local news­paper).

We concur with critics who contend that the BPOL tax can inadvertently stunt small businesses and that it scares away new ones, and we have faith that the county board’s budget initiatives are only a first step in even­tually ridding us of this cockamamie tax scheme once and for all.