WICHITA, Kan. — In December 2014, the University of Kansas agreed to pay David Beaty $800,000 a year, plus incentives, to be the football program’s head coach, but with an interesting structure: More than two-thirds of that pay would be channeled to an organization called DB Sports L.L.C.
DB Sports is what accountants call a pass-through entity, and it pays all of its profits directly to Mr. Beaty. As a result of a tax law that Kansas lawmakers passed in 2012, ostensibly to benefit beleaguered small businesses in the state, that contract structure allowed Mr. Beaty to avoid paying about $37,000 a year in state income taxes, nearly enough to fund a first-year teacher’s salary in the Wichita school district.
With the state hemorrhaging government revenue, Kansas lawmakers rolled back the tax law this year, but congressional Republicans and President Trump are trying to take the experiment with pass-through preferences national, beyond Wichita and Topeka to cities with residents who measure incomes in seven, eight or nine figures.
The Republican tax rewrite unveiled this month aims to jump-start economic growth in part by establishing a 25 percent tax rate on small businesses and other firms that operate as pass-through entities, a cut from the top rate of 39.6 percent that such business owners pay now.
But the abandoned experiment in Kansas points to how a carve-out intended to help raise growth and create jobs instead created an incentive for residents, particularly high earners, to avoid paying state income taxes by changing how they got paid.
