The visit included a 40-minute roundtable discussion with eight local small business owners, including Minuteman Press owner Mike Geygan, who told Taylor the current state of worker’s compensation amounts to “legalized extortion.”
“If you have a claim, bogus or not, you end up paying,” he said. “There’s nothing that makes it stop. The appeal process that they can go through goes forever and ever.”
Taylor said nearly every roundtable discussion she’s been a part of has included a mention of the issue and said her office would inform the Ohio Bureau of Worker’s Compensation on each occasion.
Chris Ellis, CEO of Helping Hands Healthcare, expressed concerns about employees who don’t check in for work, then file fraudulent unemployment claims.
Other items discussed included making loans and funding more available to small businesses to enable hiring more workers and the tribulations of destination-based sales tax, where the source of the transaction and its tax is determined by the destination at which the product or service is used, instead of the location of the business itself.
“Every time we roll into a different county, even if it was by ZIP code it would help a lot better than what it is now,” said Jim Bruner, owner of All American Event & Party Rental. “It’s almost a one person full time job just to track the different municipalities and pay tax now.”
Jim Burg of James Burg Tax Accounting agreed.
“Too many rules,” Burg said. “Every city has their own. The people running the cities, you call them up and they have no clue what you’re talking about.”
Taylor, who also serves as the director of the Ohio Department of Insurance, used the forum to discuss the impact the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which she referred to as “Obamacare,” on small business.
“Quite frankly, we’re concerned about what we’re seeing.” she said. “We are going to be forced to comply with a bunch of one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington that are ultimately going to be bad for Ohio.”
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