Excise Taxes are imposed on vessels in some locations, such as in Massachusetts and Maine. We provide tools to make it easier for you to collect those taxes, and/or to make sure that the taxes have been paid before approving applications involving those vessels.
Calculating/Collecting Excise Tax
Boaters are sometimes required to pay their excise tax to the State, and sometimes to the Town/City where the vessel is used. For boats registered in Maine, the excise tax is paid directly to the State of Maine. In all other known situations, the excise tax is paid to the Town/City where the vessel is used.
If you are a municipality, you don't need to do anything for excise taxes that are payable elsewhere.
For excise tax that is payable to your municipality, we provide the following options, with the easiest option (from the municipality's perspective) listed first:
1) Create an Excise Tax application type
Using this application type, a boater can submit an excise tax application, filling out all the information required to accurately calculate the Excise tax. Then we'll show the amount due, and the boater can pay the fee due. As part of this process, we can generate any required paperwork (in Massachusetts, for example, the 2-BE form) and send it to the appropriate party. The following year, we can automatically send out an e-mail reminder to go through the excise tax payment process again, with all of the previous year's information already filled out so that they only have to enter what has changed. Through our product, you can see the all excise tax payments in the current year, as well as in the past.
2) Collect Excise Tax while processing a permit
We can calculate the Excise Tax as part of another application. For example, if someone who gets a Mooring Permit should also pay Excise tax, we can charge both the Mooring Permit fee and the Excise tax and collect both in a single payment from the boater. The one downside of this approach is that it will keep you from using the easiest form of tracking the excise tax payment status that is listed below.
Some of our clients have done both: collecting Excise tax along with Mooring Permit applications, but also having a separate Excise Tax application for boaters who don't have a permit with the municipality.
3) Don't Use Online Mooring
Nothing requires you to use Online Mooring to calculate/collect payments. You can use your existing process if desired.
Keeping track of Payment Status
Many of our clients have a requirement that they can't or shouldn't approve any permits involving a vessel with outstanding Excise tax. There are options here, with the easiest option (from the reviewer's perspective) listed first.
1) Tax Payment Status indicator
This option can be used when all excise tax applications are made to your municipality, and all your excise tax payments are made through a separate Excise Tax application type in Online Mooring.
This indicator shows on the application summary page and application list pages, and shows Green if the boater is current on their excise tax payments, and red if the boater is not.
This indicator automatically resets the status to "unpaid" every year on the 1st of the month that you choose. And it automatically changes to "paid" once the tax has been paid in the current year.
With this option, we can automatically prevent you from approving applications when there is an outstanding excise tax payment. You wouldn't have to check the status yourself.
2) Require applicant to submit proof of excise tax payment
On any application that can't be approved unless the boater has paid their excise tax, you can require that they attach proof of payment from the tax collector.
As part of your application review process, you can check to make sure the attachment proves the payment to your satisfaction, and you can Approve that attachment to indicate that you've reviewed it and that it looks good.
The advantage of this approach is that it minimizes the burden on the reviewer to check with their tax collector or a state agency, sometimes repeatedly, to verify whether the tax is paid. You never have to leave Online Mooring to get the information you need.
3) Excise Tax flag
We can set up an excise tax flag, which would be similar in concept to the Tax Payment Status indicator listed above, except that you would be responsible for setting the status of that flag yourself. For larger clients, we envision that this could take significant effort on the part of the reviewer.
We do have some tools that could make this option a little easier:
- There is a way to easily flag or unflag a group of applications. At the start of the fiscal year, you could select all applications and change the flag on all of them to "Unpaid".
- You could import a list of paid vessels as frequently as you'd like. To do this, you'd need a CSV file with at least two columns: "RegDocNumber", and "Comments". We would set the Excise Tax flag to paid for each RegDocNumber in the CSV file that exactly matches with the RegDocNumber in our database, and we would update the Comment on that flag to be the value in the CSV file.
4) Don't use Online Mooring
In this case, you'd get reports from your tax collector and/or your state agency on an ongoing basis. Before you approve someone, you'd manually check your reports.