Tax Department cautions that expanded landlord-register fields could hinder renter-credit processing and raise privacy concerns

Rebecca Sam Roth, deputy commissioner at the Department of Taxes, told the House General & Housing Committee that the department’s landlord certificate — the form used to verify claims for the renter credit — already provides many data points and that adding the unit-level survey fields in Act 181 of 2024 risks reducing compliance and slowing payments to eligible low-income renters.

Roth said recent reform of the renter-credit system substantially reduced paperwork and corrected confidentiality problems; as a result, the department now issues 96 percent of renter-credit claims within 60 days, compared with about 25 percent under the old system. She said adding “unnecessary and problematic survey fields to the form as prescribed by Act 181 of 2024 would make the problem worse.”

Department analysts explained the practical differences between a landlord-certificate data set and the unit-focused information a rental registry would collect. The landlord certificate is organized around people who can claim the credit (lines for each renter who lived in the property during the tax year) and uses the SPAN (school property account number) to link property records. It is filed after the tax year (by Jan. 30) and is not designed to collect prospective unit-by-unit attributes (for example, the year each unit was built, unit-level ADA accessibility or gross monthly rent for every unit).

The department said it can and does provide owner name, owner mailing address, e-mail and phone number and property location tied to the SPAN. It can also provide aggregated information to the Vermont Housing Finance Agency (VHFA) and to the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) for official purposes; such sharing must observe confidentiality rules and cannot publish disaggregated tax data for groups smaller than 10 taxpayers. Officials noted the law already authorizes sharing with DHCD and entities conducting the state housing needs assessment and that Emergency Management receives limited data for disaster planning.

Officials cautioned that collecting gross monthly rent on each unit would raise confidentiality and compliance concerns and could create taxpayer confusion about whether the tax department would use that information for income-tax audits. They also said unit-level fields are not collected today and that adding them would require new definitions, data standards and implementation resources.

Jill Remick, director of Property Valuation and Review, added that some unit- and parcel-level fields — year built, number of units, number of stories, heating system, year of major renovation — already exist in municipal grand-list (property valuation) systems and can be transmitted through existing municipal data feeds (the grand-list/Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal systems) if the committee wants a parcel-level inventory of housing characteristics. She and Department staff urged defining a small set of practical fields and standards and using municipal grand-list submissions rather than adding burdensome new fields to the landlord certificate.

Department officials said they will meet with VHFA and other stakeholders to explore workable changes and that they will propose statutory adjustments through the appropriate vehicles; they highlighted the department’s mission to administer credits efficiently and to avoid introducing fields that reduce compliance or create taxpayer privacy concerns.