Tracking tax could jeopardise Texas tankers

A US Tracking Tax on trucks would raise prices on consumers and jeopardize countless trucking jobs across the country, according to more than 50 leaders from the Texas trucking industry, who recently flew to Washington, D.C. to meet with the state’s Congressional delegation on Capitol Hill.

One issue discussed was a “truck-only” vehicle-miles travelled (VMT) tax scheme floating in the US Senate. The proposal calls for government-mandated electronic logging devices inside privately-owned vehicles to track truckers’ movements and report them back to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) — enabling the IRS to tax trucks on every mile they move. 

In 38 separate meetings with lawmakers and their staffs, they discussed how Congress can best partner with truckers to keep America’s economy moving forward.  

Using electronic logging devices to track working Americans so the IRS can take away more of their earnings is not something we expected a senator from Texas would support. Which is why we were surprised by news reports that is a leading proponent of the truck-only VMT tax.

Despite concerns about tax administration, Texas Senator John Cornyn said he believed it would be possible to build bipartisan support for a vehicle-miles tax aimed at commercial trucks and to deal with the challenges of implementation down the road. He said: “We’re going to make it happen.” Cornyn said.

A similar VMT scheme was just recently defeated in the Texas state legislature, because, as one Texan trucking site put it, “Texans know a raw deal when they see one.”

It said the move would “throw a wrench in our economic engine and increase prices for consumers. The Texas business community knows that trucking is the backbone of the economy, because virtually every single item Texans use and rely on in daily life are available and affordable thanks to trucks. More than 80 per cent of Texas communities rely solely on trucks to move their goods.”

For a typical Texas trucker running 100,000 miles in a year, a Tracking Tax set at $0.10 per mile would increase their federal highway user taxes by an additional $10,000 — a 500 per cent increase.

For more information visit www.cbo.gov

13th March 2020