Columbus, OH – On Thursday, The Buckeye Institute filed a new lawsuit on behalf of three Ohioans—Joel Curcio and Summer Curcio of Springfield Township, Ohio, and Chris Ackerman of Walbridge, Ohio—which calls for the court to declare unconstitutional an Ohio law that allows the cities of Oregon, Ohio and Toledo, Ohio to tax the income of workers who do not live in, and have not been working within, the respective municipalities.

“Under the Due Process clause of the U.S. Constitution, a city has the power to tax non-residents only on work performed within that city,” said Jay Carson, senior litigator at The Buckeye Institute’s Legal Center and an attorney for the plaintiffs. “Here—as with The Buckeye Institute’s other tax cases—the plaintiffs have been working from home for almost a year and have not received any services from the cities of Oregon or Toledo during that time. There is simply no constitutional basis for a city to tax workers because they ‘used to work in the city.’”  

The three plaintiffs work in Lucas County. Since March of last year, all of the plaintiffs have been working from their homes, but the cities of Oregon and Toledo have continued to tax them under Ohio’s pandemic tax law—House Bill 197—which absurdly deems all work that is performed at a worker’s home to have been performed in the often higher-taxed office location. 

This new lawsuit was filed by The Buckeye Institute in Lucas County Court of Common Pleas. The Buckeye Institute currently has three similar case—Buckeye v. Kilgore filed in July 2020; Denison v. Kilgore filed in February 2021, and Schaad v. Alder filed in February 2021. The Buckeye Institute has also filed an amicus brief in New Hampshire v. Massachusetts calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to protect Granite Staters from unconstitutional taxation by Massachusetts.

# # #