How Lansing's ignorance cost Michigan a cool $280M

Brian Dickerson: How Lansing's ignorance cost Michigan a cool $280M | Detroit Free Press | freep.com:
Would you sign a contract without knowing what it might cost you?
That’s exactly what Michigan legislators did this past January — every feckless, reckless Republican and Democrat in the House and Senate — when they unanimously approved a bill making it harder for the state Treasury Department to collect overdue taxes from corporate officers.
Gov. Rick Snyder signed Public Act 3 into law less than three weeks later, boasting in a Feb. 6 news release that the legislation would “bring more fairness” to the collection of business taxes and “establish a more positive business tax environment.”

How much would all this “relentlessly positive action” cost the state in lost tax revenues?
Snyder had no clue.
Neither did state lawmakers, because the nonpartisan agency responsible for putting a price tag on legislative proposals had been unable to quantify the tax bill’s likely cost.
“This will have an unknown impact on state revenue,” the Senate Fiscal Agency’s Elizabeth Pratt wrote in an analysis submitted to the Legislature on March 3, almost a month after Snyder signed PA 3 into law.

........But just two months later, state Treasurer Kevin Clinton, Senate Fiscal Agency director Ellen Jeffries and House Fiscal Agency director Mary Ann Cleary revealed last week that the hastily adopted PA 3 will cost the state more than $280 million in tax revenues over just the next three fiscal years — more than a quarter of the $986-million reduction in estimated revenues that the three state officials disclosed Thursday.