Minnesota lawmakers grow leery of accounting gimmicks as budget deadline nears
But even as they work on a compromise on taxes and spending before the
As the budget marathon nears its end, both sides are on guard for the sort of accounting gimmickry that has often marked past spending battles at the
A letter from Walz's budget director
State Sen.
"He's raising taxes in an unprecedented way." she said. "And he still has a structural deficit because he made so many promises that he hasn't acknowledged he can't keep."
The debate underscores the Legislature's frequent use of creative accounting to patch its balance sheet. During the worst of the Great Recession, the Legislature and both Govs.
The difficult political dynamics of this legislative session could create more temptation to turn to innovative accounting to close a deal.
With fiscal deadlines approaching, lawmakers could look for pots of cash buried in state government, as well as accounting shifts and other devices that could provide enough money for an acceptable outcome for both sides.
This year, lawmakers could craft a massive public works bill approaching
The most experienced lawmakers, staff and lobbyists know where to look for hidden piggy banks -- and how to legally break them. In the past they've turned to the closed landfill fund, the airport fund and a shift of sales tax revenue from one year into another.
Sometimes the Legislature appropriates money that's never actually spent. This year, there's money in a police officer training account as well as an account for counties to encourage people with disabilities to live independently, for instance. In previous years, lawmakers used pots of money like these to find tens of millions of dollars.
But Rep.
"We are not interested in deals that will harm the state in the long run like we've seen in the past," he said.
But the biggest pile of cash is hidden in plain sight, and both parties have used it to balance their budgets in recent years. It's called the health care access fund, money that comes from a 2% tax on health care services and another tax on health insurance premiums.
It was designed to fund MinnesotaCare, a public health insurance program for the working poor. When the federal government began paying for the program after passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the Legislature set a sunset of
Since the feds started paying for MinnesotaCare, the money that flows into the fund -- about
"We all got pretty good at taking money out of the health care access fund and pretending it would solve all our budget problems," Benson said.
She wants to end the practice of balancing budgets using the fund, in part by stanching the flow of money into it, which would mean ending the provider tax as scheduled.
Walz and
Asked about the discrepancy, Benson said her approach is no different from Walz's. The governor and
"I'm happy to answer for off-spreadsheet stuff," Benson said, referring to long-term structural deficits, "when the off-spreadsheet conversation happens on both sides."
Walz and DFL lawmakers say Benson uses another accounting trick to balance the
"Artificially reducing the expected growth in medical costs is not allowed" by the federal government, the Walz administration wrote to legislative leaders last week. Doing so would imperil needed federal money.
Benson counters that administration estimates about health care programs costs have been off in the past, and that she's relying on highly sound estimates from the health insurance industry. "The governor's actuaries have been dramatically wrong about their projections" on past programs such as the state's Affordable Care Act expenses, she said.
These debates about the math lawmakers use to craft budgets could get more politically complicated in the future.
That's because the
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