Revenue Committee advances changes to tangible personal property rules, carves out mobile homes and state-assessed accounts

The Revenue Committee on Oct. 12 advanced Senate File 49, a bill that changes how tangible personal property is depreciated for property-tax purposes, adopting several amendments that carve out state-assessed accounts and titled mobile homes and reduce the depreciation floor to zero.

The bill, presented by Ken Gill, administrator of the Property Tax Division at the Wyoming Department of Revenue, would prevent county assessors from continuing to ‘‘trend’’ depreciated personal property values upward once they have reached a statutory floor. Gill said the bill as drafted would freeze an asset’s value once it reaches the floor rather than continuing to inflate that historic cost to today’s dollars.

Committee members and county assessors said the indexing that has been applied after depreciation has produced values that exceed what assessors and taxpayers expect, and they urged caution while the Department of Revenue upgrades its CAMHIS system to handle the new rule. Dixie Huxtable, Congress County assessor and a representative of the Wyoming County Assessors Association, told the committee many filers already provide a reported installed cost and recommended changing the draft…