Agenda - Council - 09/13/2022 - Laserfiche WebLink

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given that recipients may have experienced offsetting changes in revenues across sources. The final rule also provides for removing the impact of tax increasing or decreasing changes, which affect the amount of revenue collected but are not "due to" the pandemic, from the calculation of revenue loss due to the public health emergency. Both of these components of Treasury's approach provide a more accurate representation of the effect of the pandemic on overall revenues. Revenue Loss Standard Allowance: In addition to largely preserving the formula to calculate revenue loss from the interim final rule, Treasury also added an alternative "standard allowance" option for the revenue loss calculation to this final rule. Treasury's decision to elect to allow a fixed amount of loss that can be used to fund "government services" allows recipients the flexibility to use minimal administrative capacity on the calculation if desired. The decision also benefits recipients by allowing them to avoid expending administrative resources to determine how unique variations in revenue interact with the revenue loss formula. Premium Pay Per the ARPA statute, recipients have broad latitude to designate critical infrastructure sectors and make grants to third -party employers for the purpose of providing premium pay. While the final rule provides significant flexibility to implement the statutory requirement that premium pay respond to essential workers, it requires recipients give written justification in the case that premium pay would increase a worker's annual pay above a certain threshold or is awarded to an individual whose annual pay is already above that threshold. To set this threshold, Treasury analyzed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine a level that would not require further justification for premium pay to the vast majority of essential workers, while 392