Evening Briefs: New State Tax Deadline: May 17 Pearlstein Testifies
- DOR Unilaterally Delays State Tax-Filing Deadline to May 17
- Pearlstein Reflects on Holyoke Home Investigation, Timeframe
DOR Unilaterally Delays State Tax-Filing Deadline to May 17
Citing powers it can use when the president declares a disaster, the Department of Revenue on Friday unilaterally moved the Massachusetts tax filing deadline to conform with the postponed federal deadline of May 17. DOR said Massachusetts individual personal income tax returns and payments for the 2020 tax year that would have been due April 15 are now due May 17 under an extension automatically granted. On Thursday, Senate President Karen Spilka and House Speaker Ronald Mariano announced that they would effectuate a delay in the filing deadline to May 17 in legislation. That now appears to be a moot point and tax preparers will not have to wait for a bill to be passed and signed to get certainty on the state deadline. "[I]n the case of a Presidentially declared disaster, the Commissioner of Revenue ... may disregard a period of up to one year in determining whether certain taxpayer actions were performed timely, including the filing and payment of individual personal income tax returns and taxes," DOR wrote in a technical information release. "On March 13, 2020, the President of the United States issued an emergency declaration under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act in response to the ongoing 2019 novel Coronavirus ('COVID-19') pandemic, triggering the Commissioner's authority." Even after May 17, individual taxpayers will be eligible "for an automatic extension of time to file their personal income tax returns as long as the amount required to be paid for a valid personal income tax extension is paid by May 17," DOR said. The announcement from Spilka and Mariano that the House and Senate leaders had agreed to insert the tax filing deadline extension into wide-ranging legislation Thursday upset some senators who complained of learning about the addition from the News Service rather than Spilka and about not having enough notice of the change. - Colin A. Young/SHNS
Pearlstein Reflects on Holyoke Home Investigation, Timeframe
U.S. Attorney Mark Pearlstein's probe into the COVID-19 outbreak that killed at least 76 veterans who lived at the Holyoke Soldiers' Home did not face any constraints imposed by Gov. Charlie Baker's administration, though the timeframe left investigators unable to dig more deeply into "a long and rich history" of issues at the facility, Pearlstein said Friday. Nine months after the release of his bombshell report prompted the departure of Veterans' Services Secretary Francisco Urena and the termination of former Holyoke Soldiers' Home Superintendent Bennett Walsh, Pearlstein sat for nearly two hours to field questions from the legislative panel conducting its own review of the tragedy. Pearlstein said Friday that his team conducted its investigation pro bono after Baker tapped them last year, and he said the governor did not place any limits or roadblocks on their work. Sen. Anne Gobi, a Spencer Democrat, asked Pearlstein why his 174-page report focused as closely as it did on Walsh's managerial decisions and Urena's gaps in oversight and why there was not "more of a look at the real systemic problems" that she said the home has faced for years. Pearlstein responded that he was tasked with answering the governor's questions about what happened at the home and how it happened. His analysis focused on some broader issues such as staffing shortages that had been apparent before the pandemic hit, Pearlstein said, noting that investigators "did not have the luxury of time to do a comprehensive history of the soldiers' home." "There's no doubt that there is a long and rich history at the soldiers' home of problems and dysfunction," Pearlstein said, offering labor management as an example that "at least indirectly" contributed to the deadly outbreak. "But to dissect the history of labor management dysfunction at the home would have been a very lengthy exercise, to be sure, and really would have been beyond the scope of what we were asked to do." Despite that, Pearlstein stressed that a deeper analysis of structural issues would not have changed his conclusions about the sequence of decisions and oversight failures that exacerbated the public health crisis. He added that other investigative bodies that have a "broader scope," such as the special legislative committee holding Friday's hearing, might have the bandwidth to "take a more panoramic view." - Chris Lisinski/SHNS
-END-
3/19/2021