The ink is not yet dry on legislation that will impost significant new taxes on selected services.  There are efforts to end the tax before it goes into effect on December 1, 2007.  In the final 24 hours of the state budget deadline, state lawmakers passed — and the Governor signed into law — a major expansion of the sales tax to 57 new services. There was no public hearing or opportunity to comment. The passage of this legislation has created anger and confusion among Michigan job providers.

A growing coalition of 39 business organizations has been formed to support repeal of the service tax. The name of the group is the Coalition to Ax the Tax. The goal of the coalition is to get the service tax repealed before it goes into effect on December 1, 2007. If that effort fails, the coalition will seek to put a repeal on the November 2008 statewide ballot.

Currently, there are four bills concerning the service tax. Three bills have been introduced to repeal the service tax. They are: Senate Bill 824 (Brown), Senate Bill 838 (Cassis) and House Bill 5280 (Acciavatti). The fourth bill, House Bill 5198 (Tobocman), is the bill that imposes the service tax.