Arizona is the latest state to expand school choice. Yesterday, the Arizona legislature passed a bill to expand the type of corporations eligible to participate as donors in the Grand Canyon State’s scholarship tax credit (STC) program and to streamline the program’s tax credit approval process.
Under current law, only C‑corporations are eligible to receive tax credits in return for donations to state‐approved scholarship organizations. The legislation expands donor eligibility to include S‑corporations and limited liability corporations, which are typically smaller businesses relative to C‑corps. Expanding the donor pool will make it easier for scholarship organizations to raise money to help low‐income and disabled students attend the schools of their choice.
The bill also mandates that the Arizona Department of Revenue create a website to process the tax credit requests electronically. Since the STC program caps the total amount of tax credits issued in a given year, the AZ-DOR must pre‐approve donations to be eligible for tax credits. According to the Center for Arizona Policy, the current system can be “a tedious and lengthy process [that] often discourages donors from participating.” The web‐based approval process is expected to be much faster and easier.
This is the latest of numerous STC program expansions. Earlier this year, state legislatures in Iowa and Georgia voted overwhelmingly to expand their states’ STC programs. Last year, Arizona and Florida expanded their STC programs as well. In total, six of the seven states to enact STC programs before 2010 have subsequently expanded them.
