Date: Assignment commenced Q1 2007, completed Q4 2008
Scope of Work: The St. John’s RVA office of Altus Group was selected through a competitive process by the City to undertake the study.
The study involved:
- Research of similar tax reforms in other Canadian jurisdictions
- Interviewing municipal participants
- Leveraging Altus Tax consultants expertise across the region
- Determining positive and negative impacts over the duration of the tax change
- Undertaking several ‘focus group’ meetings with commercial property owners and other interested parties within the City
- Building a taxation model that replicated the assessment and tax flows in order to identify weighting shifts of the tax burden within the various business occupancy tax categories from before the tax reform to after the tax reform
The model integrated the entire City commercial assessment of $2,475,000,000 and tax flows of $24,240,000 from business realty and $21,066,000 from business occupancy.
The study identified major issues that would result from the tax reform and made recommendations of ways to mitigate such issues.
The report was presented to the City and the taxpayer committee in 2009.