The deadline for SUTA draws near.

· by Herb Dew

Herb is the CEO of HTI. He founded HTI in 1999 along with John Knight and David Sewell, and remains heavily involved in the organization today.
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Latest news on SC SUTA issue. The house seems more on top of this than the senate despite the senates continued involvement since early February. Our tax bill has to be paid Monday May 2nd. It is a 365% increase over 2010! It appears we will have to pay that and hope that any legislation that passes is retroactive. The legislators have assured many of us that it would.

There continues to be strong support from the house, senate and the governors office to get some relief for 2011. Recent SCDEW announcements regarding payment relief are misleading…the annualized interest rate is still 12% and SC DEW responsiveness to requests is sketchy.

Let me be clear my position on this. I have watched this since last year develop and tried to be reasonable about the responsibility that companies have who utilize more benefits versus those that use less. I have analyzed the numbers over and over agaon. They just don’t work. The bill is a BAD BILL! It is. NEVER during an economy like this should a reorganization of such a significant business tax been rolled out without alot of real data being run to study the impact.At HTI, we will have an account surplus by the end of 2011. Meaning we will pay BACK the last 7 years shortfall we have as a company, plus be stuck in 2012 at tier 13-20. The system is inherently flawed. It would have been better for the legislator to adopt a self funded system like the state agencies get and let each company pay as it uses, with all of us paying a small % to cover business failures and the cost of SC DEW ( a collossal waste of tax payer money).

The best solution was to roll back the law and increase this years rates across the board so a long term, healthy system could be implemented. That will not happen. So we will get some sort of relief and continue to fight the battle on other fronts. This story is far from gone. SC SUTA will be an issue for SC for years to come.

At HTI we have found NUMEROUS incidents involving improper claims being processed, being awarded, claims not being ended, etc. We have documented these and will be forwarding them to both SC DEW and the senate LCI committee. Improvements….actual improvements, are whats needed to begin to heal a system plagued by ineptness. Hopefully all of this will pull companies into the mix on demanding an effective state agency using our money well.

Herb Dew