US Politics

Ilhan Omar has called on the Biden administration to phase out immigration detention contracts between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and local jails and prisons.In a letter to Susan Rice, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Minnesota Democrat said the contracts perpetuated mass incarceration.“In order to truly sever the financial incentives causing the expansion of an unnecessary and abuse-ridden system of mass incarceration, we urge you to end contracts between the federal government and localities for the purposes of immigration detention,” Omar wrote, in a letter also signed by other Democratic members of Congress.Immigration activists have for years targeted such contracts at local levels.In New Jersey, lawmakers are considering proposals that would prevent counties, municipalities and private prison operators from entering into such contracts or renewing or extending those already in effect. In California in 2019 the governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a law blocking the state from entering into or renewing contracts with private prison companies.Biden is under pressure to address the sprawling US immigration detention system, the largest in the world and rampant with allegations of abuse.More than 70 members of Congress, including Omar, have called on Biden to phase out the use of private prisons for immigration detention. Biden signed an executive order to do so at justice department facilities, but not at facilities which detain migrants.Biden’s administration is also attempting to respond to an increase in asylum-seeking children at the southern border. A near-record 9,457 unaccompanied children were taken into US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody in February, according to the agency, the most since May 2019.In recent weeks, thousands of children have stayed in CBP facilities beyond the 72-hour legal limit, after which they are supposed to be moved to the care of the US health department.A CBP tent facility in Donna, some 165 miles south of Dallas, is holding more than 1,000 children and teenagers, some as young as four. Lawyers who inspect immigrant detention facilities have said they have interviewed children who reported being held in packed conditions, some sleeping on the floor, others not able to shower for five days.Biden is using the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), best known for responding to natural disasters, to manage and care for the children.Later on Monday, it was reported that the administration plans to use a downtown Dallas convention center to hold up to 3,000 immigrant teenagers.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center will be used for up to 90 days beginning as early as this week, according to written notification sent to members of the Dallas city council on Monday and obtained by the Associated Press. Federal agencies will use the facility to house boys ages 15 to 17, according to the memo, which described the soon-to-open site as a “decompression center”. More

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Two men have been arrested and charged with assaulting Brian Sicknick, the police officer who died after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January in support of the former president’s attempt to overturn election defeat by Joe Biden.
Julian Elie Khater, 32, of Pennsylvania and George Pierre Tanios, 39, from West Virginia, were arrested by the FBI on Sunday and expected to appear in federal court on Monday.
They were charged with assaulting Sicknick with a “toxic spray”, thought to be bear spray, which Khater was allegedly seen discharging into the officer’s face in footage of the riot. It is not yet known if it caused Sicknick’s death.
Sicknick, 42, was one of five people to die as a direct result of the assault, which Donald Trump incited when he told supporters to “fight like hell” in his cause. The officer died in hospital on 7 January. A police statement said he “was injured while physically engaging with protesters” and “returned to his division office and collapsed”.
His body lay in state at the Capitol. The cause of his death is still not known. Initial statements that he suffered blunt force trauma after being hit with a fire extinguisher were walked back. Investigators now believe Sicknick may have ingested a chemical substance, possibly bear spray, that may have played a role in his death.
Court papers stated: “Officers Sicknick, Edwards and Chapman suffered injuries as a result of being sprayed in the face with an unknown substance by Khater. The officers were temporary blinded by the substance, were temporary disabled from performing their duties and needed medical attention and assistance from fellow officers.”
In social media footage, Khater is seen spraying Sicknick and others with a spray he refers to as “bear shit”, according to the court papers. The spray has not been directly linked to Sicknick’s death. More

California’s governor on Monday launched a political committee to raise money to defend his seat in a potential recall election, the strongest acknowledgment to date that he expects to be on the ballot this year.
“I won’t be distracted by this partisan, Republican recall – but I will fight it,” Gavin Newsom said in a tweet. “There is too much at stake,” he added.
Organizers of the recall face a deadline on Wednesday to submit the 1.5m petition signatures necessary to place the election on the ballot. They say they have collected over 2m signatures far, though hundreds of thousands must still be validated by election officials.
But Newsom’s new fundraising arm could soon send a powerful message to his possible rivals: under state rules, the governor alone is allowed to raise money in unlimited amounts, while other candidates must adhere to contribution limits.
It’s likely Newsom will soon receive a flood of cash from his familiar Democratic constituency, including powerful public worker unions that spent millions of dollars helping install him in office in 2018.
Newsom has lined up support from state and national Democrats to defeat the campaign against him. The committee started the drive with an advertisement attacking the recall effort as a Republican power grab.
New Jersey Democratic senator Cory Booker said in a statement released by the committee that Newsom’s leadership during the pandemic “kept Californians safe and helped them recover financially”.
Defeating the recall “will be one of the most important priorities for Democrats this year”, Booker said.
Democrats have depicted the recall effort as seeded with extremists. Recall organizers claim 38% of petition signatures have come from independents, Democrats, and people who did not list their political party. That could not be immediately verified.
Newsom for months sidestepped questions about the recall, but has more recently started to ramp up his political operation and strategy. He’s been traveling the state holding events to highlight coronavirus vaccinations, while a string of supporters have started staging online news conferences in an attempt to turn public favor his way.
The governor made his most direct comments to date on the recall last Friday in an interview with San Francisco’s KQED news radio station, depicting the effort as a challenge to his administration’s progressive policies and not a reaction to his leadership during the pandemic that has claimed over 55,000 lives in California.
“It’s about immigration. It’s about our healthcare policies. It’s about our criminal justice reform. It’s about the diversity of the state. It’s about our clean air, clean water programs, meeting our environmental strategies,” he told KQED.
Newsom received high praise for his aggressive approach to the coronavirus last spring, when he issued the nation’s first statewide stay-at-home order. But in more recent months, he has faced growing public anger over health orders that shuttered schools and businesses, the state’s slow vaccine rollout, and a massive unemployment benefits fraud scandal.
He also took a public drubbing for attending a birthday party with friends and lobbyists at the exclusive French Laundry restaurant, while telling residents to stay home for safety.
Two Republicans have announced their candidacies: Kevin Faulconer, the former Republican mayor of San Diego, and Republican businessman John Cox, who was defeated by Newsom in 2018.
Another name being discussed in GOP circles is Donald Trump’s then acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, who has not responded to requests for comment on a possible candidacy.
California is one of 19 states that allow voters to remove elected officials before their terms expire. Calling a recall election is fairly easy. The only requirement is to collect a number of signatures equal to 12% of the voters in the last election for the office. Recall petitions have been launched against every California governor in the last 61 years – though they are almost never successful. More

The US should boycott the Beijing Winter Olympic Games next year, Mitt Romney said on Monday – but not by keeping its skiers, curlers and bobsledders at home.In a New York Times column, the Utah senator said Washington should implement “an economic and diplomatic boycott” of the quadrennial winter sports jamboree.Such a move, he said, would “demonstrate our repudiation of China’s abuses in a way that will hurt the Chinese Communist party rather than our American athletes: reduce China’s revenues, shut down their propaganda and expose their abuses”.Romney went on to list such abuses. China, he wrote, had “reneged on its agreement to allow Hong Kong self rule; it has brutally suppressed peaceful demonstrators and incarcerated respected journalists”.“It is exacting genocide against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities; Uighur women are forcefully sterilized or impregnated by Han Chinese men. Adults, ripped from their families, are sentenced into forced labor and concentration camps. Among ethnic Chinese, access to uncensored broadcast news and social media is prohibited. Citizens are surveyed, spied upon and penalized for attending religious services or expressing dissent.”Romney is a former venture capitalist and Massachusetts governor who famously took charge of preparations for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. Debate has raged ever since over the extent to which he helped to “save” an operation dogged by financial and management scandals.Romney won the Republican nomination for president in 2012, a race he lost after Barack Obama pulled away in the home straight. The Republican’s Secret Service codename was the appropriately the Olympic-sounding “Javelin” and he regularly referred to his success in Salt Lake City. Beijing last hosted the summer Olympics in 2004. It will be the first city to host the winter games too, but it seems sure to face some sort of boycott.Groups representing Uighurs, Tibetans, Hong Kong and campaigners for democracy in China are pushing for athletes or diplomatic boycotts. Having failed to persuade the International Olympic Committee to move the games out of China, activists are targeting national committees, athletes and sponsors.The US last mounted a boycott in 1980, when American athletes stayed away from the summer games in Moscow in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. China also stayed away then.But in Romney’s view now, “prohibiting our athletes from competing in China [in 2022] is the easy, but wrong, answer”.“… The right answer is an economic and diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics. American spectators – other than families of our athletes and coaches – should stay at home, preventing us from contributing to the enormous revenues the Chinese Communist party will raise from hotels, meals and tickets. American corporations that routinely send large groups of their customers and associates to the games should send them to US venues instead.“Rather than send the traditional delegation of diplomats and White House officials to Beijing, the president should invite Chinese dissidents, religious leaders and ethnic minorities to represent us.”Romney also called on NBC, which broadcasts the Olympics in the US, to “refrain from showing any jingoistic elements of the opening and closing ceremonies and instead broadcast documented reports of China’s abuses”.In his own column on Monday, for Fox News, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz said US athletes “should go to Beijing next year proudly, bring home medal after medal, and show the world what it means to compete on behalf of a free society”. More

Joan Phillips, a certified nursing assistant in a Florida nursing home, loved her job but dreaded the danger of going to work in the pandemic. When vaccines became available in December, she jumped at the chance to get one.Months later, it appears that danger has faded. After the rollout of Covid vaccines, the number of new Covid cases among nursing home staff fell 83% – from 28,802 for the week ending 20 December to 4,764 for the week ending 14 February, data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services shows.New Covid-19 infections among nursing home residents fell even more steeply, by 89%, in that period, compared with 58% in the general public, CMS and Johns Hopkins University data show.These numbers suggest that “the vaccine appears to be having a dramatic effect on reducing cases, which is extremely encouraging,” said Beth Martino, spokesperson for the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living, an industry group.“It’s a big relief for me,” said Phillips, who works at the North Beach Rehabilitation Center outside Miami. Now, she said, she’s urging hesitant co-workers and anyone else who can to “go out and take the vaccination”.After a brutal year in which the pandemic killed half a million Americans, despite unprecedented measures to curb its spread – including mask-wearing, physical distancing, school closures and economic shutdowns – the vaccines are giving hope that an end is in sight.National figures on healthcare worker infections in other settings are hard to come by.Research in other countries suggests that vaccines have led to big drops in infection. A study of publicly funded hospitals in England indicated that a first dose was 72% effective at preventing Covid-19 among workers after 21 days and 86% effective seven days after the second shot.Lost on the Frontline, a year-long data and reporting project by KHN and the Guardian, is investigating over 3,500 Covid deaths of US healthcare workers. The monthly number has been declining since December, but deaths often lag weeks or months behind infections.Along with other healthcare workers, nursing home staff and residents were first in line to get vaccines in December because elderly people in congregate settings are among the most vulnerable to infection: more than 125,000 residents have died of Covid, CMS data shows, while over 550,000 nursing home staff members have tested positive and more than 1,600 have died.Yet the vaccination rate among staffers is far lower than that of residents. When the first clinics ran from mid-December to mid-January, a median of 78% of nursing home residents took a dose, while the median for staff was only 38%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now several nursing home associations said the rate of staff vaccination has been climbing, based on informal surveys.Vaccine uptake by nursing home residents has been “very promising,” said Dr Morgan Katz, a specialist in infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University who is advising Covid responses in nursing homes. “I do think this is a huge contributing factor” to the drop in staff cases, she said.Having even one or two vaccinated people in a building can slow transmission.Another factor, Katz said, is that “many nursing homes have already experienced large outbreaks – so there are probably a significant proportion of residents and staff who are already immune.” Also, Covid rates have fallen nationally after a spike from holiday travel and gatherings in November and December, so staff members have less exposure in their communities.But “even though we’re seeing a really wonderful turn in the number of cases,” she said, “we need to remember that as long as the staff is 50 or 30% vaccinated, they remain vulnerable, and they’re also putting incredibly vulnerable long-term care residents at risk.”Vaccination efforts are racing against time as new Covid variants circulate and some states dramatically relax Covid restrictions, making it easier for the virus to spread.Distrust fuels vaccine hesitancyThe question of why some workers refuse the vaccine looms. The New Jersey Veterans Memorial Home at Menlo Park endured a major outbreak last year in which more than 100 workers contracted Covid and over 60 residents and a certified nurse assistant, Monemise Romelus, died. Shirley Lewis, a union president representing CNAs and other workers, said it was traumatizing. Still, only about half of workers there have taken the vaccine, Lewis said, and one is out sick with Covid.“A lot of my members are not too excited about taking this vaccine because they’re afraid,” Lewis said.Some workers want to wait a little longer to see how safe the vaccine is, she said. Others tell her they don’t trust the vaccines because they were developed so quickly, she said.Other staffers “feel like it’s an experimental drug,” Lewis said, “because as you know, Blacks, Latinos, other groups have been used for experiments” like the Tuskegee syphilis study, she said.Vaccine hesitancy is higher among 30- to 49-year-olds, rural residents and Black and Hispanic adults, according to KFF.A lot of my members are not too excited about taking this vaccineCertified nursing assistants, who make up the bulk of long-term care workers, have historically been less likely to get flu vaccines than other healthcare workers, noted Jasmine Travers, an assistant professor of nursing at New York University who studies vaccine hesitancy. Nursing homes typically don’t have nurse educators, who address worker concerns about vaccines in hospitals, she said, and CNAs also face structural barriers such as limited internet access.Nursing homes tend to be hierarchies commonly led by white staffers, while about 50% of CNAs, at the bottom of the power structure, are Black or Hispanic, she added.With the Covid vaccine, some are afraid theywill have to take sick time to miss work and don’t want to burden their co-workers, who are already short-staffed, Travers said.Deliberate misinformationLow vaccine uptake among long-term care workers has been a concern nationally – so much so that LeadingAge, a national group representing not-for-profit long-term care facilities, held a virtual town hall about vaccine safety on 4 March with the Black Coalition Against Covid-19.The event, which drew over 45,000 viewers, was geared toward Black long-term care workers.Dr Reed Tuckson, co-founder of the Black Coalition Against Covid-19, said viewers raised concerns about fertility, pregnancy and contraindications. He said the event also had “a lot of provocateurs” who insisted, “it’s all a myth, it’s all a lie.”His group plans to hold more public informational sessions aimed at Black audiences.“There is no question that the three vaccines that we now have available to us are extraordinarily safe and tremendously effective,” said Tuckson, a former public health commissioner in Washington.The nursing home industry has set a goal to have 75% of staff members vaccinated nationwide by the end of June.Hesitancy doesn’t mean refusalMost nursing homes have not mandated vaccinations, industry officials say, due to fear of losing staff. Because the vaccines were authorized on an emergency basis, liability is also a concern.Juniper Communities, which runs 22 long-term care facilities in four states and employs almost 1,300 people, had 30 workers leave the job after it mandated vaccines, according to Dr Lynne Katzmann, president and CEO.Even when staff are initially reluctant to take vaccines, “it doesn’t mean that this is a permanent refusal,” Travers said.In south-western Ohio, Kenn Daily runs two nursing homes run by Ayden Healthcare. About half of his staff and 85% of residents got vaccinated by mid-February, he said, and they haven’t had a case of Covid since. Still, he said, vaccine resistance persists among younger staffers who read misinformation online.“Facebook is the bane of my existence,” Daily said. Workers tell him they worry “they’re going to microchip me,” or that the vaccine will change their DNA.Now that time has passed since the initial rollout, Daily said, “I’m hoping to put a little pressure on my staff to step up and get vaccinated.”His message: “It’s working, guys. It’s working very well.”KHN data editor Elizabeth Lucas contributed to this report.KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation. More

The coronavirus vaccination czar for New York governor Andrew Cuomo made appeals for political support for the embattled politician, prompting ethical concerns, according to multiple media reports Sunday.New York’s “vaccination czar”, longtime Cuomo aide Larry Schwartz, reportedly pivoted in at least one telephone conversation with a county executive from a discussion of vaccination policy directly to an appeal for support for Cuomo.Schwartz has denied mixing political and policy calls or acting improperly.Cuomo, the state’s governor since 2010, is in a fight for his political life under the weight of a half-dozen sexual misconduct allegations and a scandal over the deliberate misreporting of Covid deaths in nursing homes.Both US senators from New York and most of the congressional delegation have called on Cuomo to resign, as prosecutors investigate the charges against the three-term governor.“There is no way I resign,” Cuomo said last week. The governor has denied all allegations of sexual misconduct. He is up for re-election in 2022.One county executive has already filed a preliminary report with state attorney general Letitia James of a possible ethics violation by the Cuomo administration in the Schwartz matter, according to reporting in the Washington Post and New York Times.“At best, it was inappropriate,” an unnamed executive told the Post of Schwartz’s mixing discussions of vaccination policy and Cuomo’s political future. “At worst, it was clearly over the ethical line.”At least two other county executives reported a close juxtaposition of phone conversations about vaccine policy with other conversations with Schwartz about supporting Cuomo.Schwartz served as the governor’s top aide for four years during Cuomo’s first administration and was called back into service after the outbreak of the coronavirus emergency.He denied inappropriate conversations with county-level officials; he acknowledged he made calls but said he did so as a long-time friend of Cuomo and did not discuss vaccines in them. “I did nothing wrong,” Schwartz told the Washington Post. “I have always conducted myself in a manner commensurate to a high ethical standard.”With the most influential Democrats in the state already having turned on Cuomo as his third term wanes, the governor’s political fate may be beyond the ability of county-level officials to decide.The rollout of vaccines in New York state has roughly tracked the national average. The state endured one of the worst and deadliest outbreaks of Covid-19 early in the pandemic, with Cuomo’s clear daily communication at the time about the threat winning him praise, especially in contrast with former president Donald Trump.But outgoing New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who has for years been locked in a personal feud with Cuomo, was among those criticizing Albany for not doing enough to get vaccine doses to the city.“We don’t get our fair share of vaccines for this city,” De Blasio told CBS News’ Face the Nation program on Sunday. “We’re vaccinating people not just from the city, but also from the suburbs, surrounding states.”De Blasio predicted that Cuomo would resign under pressure from an impeachment inquiry that was opened by the state assembly judiciary committee last week.“He is used to getting things his way, and it has been almost an imperial governorship,” De Blasio said. But the folks in this state and the political leadership don’t believe him anymore. He doesn’t have any credibility. I think an impeachment proceeding will begin, and I think he will be impeached, and perhaps right before that he’ll decide to resign.”Nearly 6,000 people in New York state tested positive for coronavirus on Saturday, and 62 people died.The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post joined most of the state’s Democratic congressional delegation in calling on Cuomo to resign in an editorial.“Simply put: Any fair effort to get to the bottom of the avalanche of sexual-harassment allegations could take months – whereas legislators already have all the evidence they need to move to impeach Governor Cuomo immediately for his nursing-home horrors,” the paper said.At the height of the early coronavirus crisis, while Cuomo’s tone and leadership struck a defining contrast with Trump, the latest allegations against the Cuomo administration evoked a different kind of unflattering association with Trump.The former president explicitly tied coronavirus aid for states on the willingness of governors to demonstrate political fealty to him. Now county executives allege that a Cuomo aide has hinted at a similar tie.Among those who caught the association was Donald Trump Jr, who tweeted on Sunday afternoon: “Andrew Cuomo is everything the media pretended Trump was times about 1000.” More

Stacey Abrams has described Republican efforts to restrict voting rights in Georgia as “racist” and “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie”.Abrams, who helped Democrats win two key US Senate runoff elections in her home state in January that gave the party a narrow control of the chamber, is a leading critic of voter suppression efforts by Republicans.The bill in Georgia, SB241, includes various measures including ending the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse, and other new identification requirements. Republicans have held up what they say is a risk of voter fraud as justification for the legislation despite the lack of evidence of wrongdoing.Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Abrams said the moves by lawmakers in Georgia would significantly curtail voting access after a record number of voters propelled Democratic victories in the 2020 race.“Well, first of all, I do absolutely agree that it’s racist. It is a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie. We know that the only thing that precipitated these changes, it’s not that there was the question of security.“In fact, the secretary of state and the governor went to great pains to assure America that Georgia’s elections were secure. And so the only connection that we can find is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like.“And so, instead of celebrating better access and more participation, their response is to try to eliminate access to voting for primarily communities of color. And there’s a direct correlation between the usage of drop boxes, the usage of in person early voting, especially on Sundays, and the use of vote by mail and a direct increase in the number of people of color voting.”Filibuster reformAbrams, a former senior state legislator and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, also called on Sunday for the US Senate to exempt election reform legislation passed by the House of Representatives over Republican opposition from a procedural hurdle called the filibuster.“Protection of democracy is so fundamental that it should be exempt from the filibuster rules,” Abrams told CNN.The Democratic-led House on 3 March passed a bill intended to reform voting procedures, increase voter participation and require states to assign independent commissions the task of redrawing congressional districts to guard against partisan manipulation.There is a debate among Democrats, who narrowly control the Senate thanks to those two Georgia victories, on whether to modify or even eliminate the filibuster, a longstanding fixture that makes it so most legislation cannot advance without 60 votes in the 100-seat Senate rather than a simple majority.The filibuster already has been scaled back and does not apply to judicial or Cabinet appointments and some budgetary measures, Abrams noted, so it should be suspended for the voting rights legislation. Abrams, a former minority leader in the Georgia house of representatives, has emerged as a leading Democratic voice on voting rights.Democratic President Joe Biden has said he would sign the election legislation into law if it is passed by Congress, but also has indicated opposition to completely eliminating the filibuster.The House-passed bill faces long odds in the Senate under current rules, where all 48 Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them would need to be joined by 10 of the 50 Republican senators to overcome a filibuster.Democrats have argued that the legislation is necessary to lower barriers to voting and to make the US political system more democratic and responsive to the needs of voters.Republicans have said it would take powers away from the states, and have promised to fight it if it becomes law. More

Thanks to the stimulus programs, there are now five ways small can save big on their taxes in 2021 … and even get money back.The signing of the American Rescue Act this week means that more than $5tn has been spent on stimulus programs in the US to fight the economic impact of the Covid pandemic. A significant amount of this money has been earmarked towards funding small businesses, such as the paycheck protection program and the economic injury disaster loan program. However, all of the stimulus programs contained generous tax incentives that can not only save business owners a significant amount on their taxes in 2021, but also provide additional funding. Here are five that every small business owner should be considering.Employee retention tax creditThe employee retention tax credit is one such tax incentive. The credit was initially part of the March 2020 Cares Act and has been extended through 31 December 2021. To be eligible for the credit for any quarter in 2021 a business must show that it has been partially or fully shut down or experienced a revenue decline of more than 20% that quarter compared with the same quarter in 2019. If eligible, then the business can take a credit of up to $7,000 per employee per quarter based on their wages against their employer payroll taxes owed.The big deal is that if the credit is larger than what’s owed, the business can get the difference back in cash. The credit is also available to businesses that participate in the paycheck protection program, although wages used for forgiveness cannot be used to calculate the credit. The criteria for claiming the credit in 2020 are different but businesses owners can still apply to do that. All of these calculations are done on a company’s quarter federal tax returns.Families First Coronavirus Response Act tax creditAnother tax benefit has to do with the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA). This legislation predated the Cares Act in 2020 and required employers to compensate their employees if they had to take time off because they, or their family members, were affected by Covid. This includes having to stay home to supervise their children while they attended virtual classes. The act provided for a tax credit where the business owner could claim money back on their federal payroll tax returns for the wages they were required to pay.The FFCRA is now voluntary in 2021. But for those employers that do continue to offer these benefits – which now includes time off to get vaccinated or to recover from any effects of vaccinations – the credit is still available and has been extended through September.Cobra tax creditCobra – or Continuation of Health Coverage – is a federal law that requires employers to make health insurance available under their corporate health plans to employees for a certain period of time who lose their benefits because of layoffs or reduced hours of employment. The idea is that people don’t lose their health insurance if they lose their jobs, but they do have to pay.In a new provision, the American Rescue Plan now fully subsidizes for the continuation of Cobra benefits for employees from April through September and offers a tax credit for employers who continue to pay for the health insurance premiums on behalf of their laid-off employee.Carryback of lossesThere is another big benefit for companies that lost money in either 2020, 2019 or 2018.Thanks to the Cares Act – and subsequent stimulus bills which kept this rule in place – companies that lost money those years can, for one time only, carry back those losses for up to five years. Which means that if a business paid taxes in the past, those losses would reduce what was owed and therefore a company would be due the money back. Normally tax rules don’t allow this kind of carryback but this year is an exception. We’re telling our clients to amend and file their corporate returns as quickly as possible in order to start the refund process, which takes an average of six weeks.Work opportunity tax creditThe National Federation of Independent Businesses reported this past week that 40% of their surveyed members had open jobs to fill and another 56% of owners reported hiring or trying to hire in February, up five points from January. These numbers are likely to increase significantly over the next few months as the economy recovers. The good news is that a big tax credit related to hiring has been extended through 2025.It’s called the work opportunity tax credit and it provides a credit on income taxes due for any employer that hires a veteran, someone off of welfare or – more timely – a worker who has been unemployed more than six months. It could be an enormous tax benefit for those employers who take advantage. Some of my clients are calculating this credit in advance before a hire and then using it as a signing bonus to help them better compete against others seeking talent.Clearly there are significant tax benefits – many which include cash refunds – for small business owners who choose to take advantage of them. My smartest clients are already talking to their tax advisers and getting help. They know that these benefits are short-term. They also know that leveraging them could provide much needed funds to help them navigate to, and through, the post-pandemic recovery. More