Speaking on Tuesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reportedly said that health care workers who traveled to New York to help the state reeling from the coronavirus will have to pay state taxes.
Cuomo stated, “We’re not in a position to provide any subsidies right now because we have a $13 billion deficit. So there’s a lot of good things I’d like to do, and if we get federal funding, we can do, but it would be irresponsible for me to sit here looking at a $13 billion deficit and say I’m gonna spend more money, when I can’t even pay the essential services,” PIX11 News reported.
Cuomo said the state simply couldn’t afford subsidizing state income tax for the workers who came to New York, saying, “If we don’t get more money from Washington, we can’t fund schools, right, so at the rate we want to fund them. We are in dire financial need.”
PIX11News reported, “Even though the state government asked thousands of people to come to New York from out of state to help fight coronavirus, they will have to pay New York state taxes, even on income they might make from their home states that they’re paid while in New York.”
Ken Isaacs, a vice president of Samaritan’s Purse, the Christian organization that built a temporary hospital in Central Park, said, “Our financial comptroller called me and he said, ‘Do you know that all of you are going to be liable for New York state income tax?’ I said, ‘What?’”
Isaacs said the comptroller pointed out, “Yeah, there’s a law. If you work in New York State for more than 14 days, you have to pay state income tax.”
Isaacs told PIX11 News, “I didn’t know that … What we’re even more concerned about than the money is the bureaucracy, and the paperwork, and I think that once that’s unleashed…once you start filing that, you have to do that for like a whole year or something.” Lawrence Spielman, a partner at the accounting firm Spielman, Koenigsberg & Parker, LLP, has noted that entities from “these other states will have to register in New York and do withholding here in New York.”
PIX11 News noted, “Any out-of-state resident who’s come to the Empire State to work on coronavirus relief is subject to the tax after 14 days here.”
Roughly two weeks ago, at a briefing to give an update on the response of his state government to the coronavirus crisis, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stated that economic hardship was “not death.” He also snapped at a reporter who asked if there was a fundamental right to work if the government couldn’t get a person the money when they needed it, “By the way, you want to go to work? Go take a job as an essential worker. Do it tomorrow.”
During that same briefing, Cuomo stated, “You have a responsibility to me. It’s not just about you. You have a responsibility to me, right? We started here saying, it’s not about ‘me’; it’s about ‘we.’ Get your head around the ‘we’ concept. So it’s not all about you; it’s about me, too. It’s about ‘we.’”
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