CompTIA Renews Push for IT Training Tax Credit

If CompTIA has its way, Congress will pass a host of initiatives that will make life easier for small and midsize businesses.

The Computing Technology Industry Association, an industry group dedicated to IT, on Feb. 25 announced its legislative priorities for 2008.

Broadly categorized into three areas—investing in the U.S. work force, promoting innovation and investing in SMBs—the initiatives are designed to make it easier for companies to remain competitive and profitable in the IT arena.

One of the biggest hot-button issues for CompTIA and its members is the institution of an IT tax credit for individuals and employers that would provide $2,500 per employee for the cost of IT training or retraining. With this tax credit, for which CompTIA has been fighting for seven years, employers would be better able to retain employees’ IT skills.

That’s important for any size company but perhaps most important for smaller companies, said Michael Wendy, a director at CompTIA.

“Smaller companies are concerned about finding and keeping labor in a fairly tight market, so anything that can help people [retain] skills or get new skills will help them stay competitive,” he said.

Along the same lines, CompTIA is pushing for an end to the caps associated with the H-1B visa program, a program that allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers for jobs for which no American is qualified or available. Currently, the cap is 65,000 workers per fiscal year, which Wendy said is just one-thousandth of the IT work force.

“We want to see that cap lifted so companies find the skilled labor they can’t find in the United States,” he said.

Lifting the cap will help small businesses compete with larger businesses in gaining access to the skilled IT staff they need, Wendy said.

Saving money—an important goal in this economy—also runs through many of CompTIA’s policy goals. For example, CompTIA wants to see a temporary tax credit for research and development be made permanent, which would help companies afford to retain employees who are developing innovative products and technologies.

CompTIA also wants to make permanent the temporary increase in small business IT expense deductions, which require a company to have less than $800,000 in capital expenses to use. The existing deduction—$125,000—was temporarily doubled to $250,000 via the new economic stimulus package, but CompTIA wants to make that increase permanent.

And to address SMBs’ top concern—health care—CompTIA is pushing hard to get the Small Business Health Plan initiative passed. This initiative would allow multiple small businesses in the same state to form a collective pool to negotiate lower-priced health care insurance for their employees from a national insurer.