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Editing taxes

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Morgan Erickson

Hi! Two-part question here. My team and I are working on a project surrounding a local data center and have some questions regarding taxes.

We are wondering if it is possible to change how IMPLAN accounts for sales tax? For example, electricity purchases. In Minnesota, as of 2025 data centers are no longer allowed to use a sales tax exemption on electricity. As of now the most current data year for our study is 2024. If it is possible, we would like to account for this as electricity purchases are make up a large portion of a data center's operational budget. Certain criteria needed to be met for the sales tax exemption to be in effect, so I'm wondering if in IMPLAN it would have been applied in the first place? We are modeling the analysis using sector 418 - Data processing, hosting, and related services, and our analysis is located in St. Louis County, MN.

Our second question is about property taxes. We are running the analysis as a county-wide impact, but is it possible to run the model and exclude a local/city property tax? My understanding is that there isn't necessarily a toggle or switch to flip them off and that the easiest way to do that would be to download the results tables in excel after the analysis is done, then manually delete what you would like to exclude. Are there any alternatives?

Thank you! 

-Morgan

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    Lauren Benavidez-Brouk

    Hi Morgan,
    For both questions there isn't really a way to modify how taxes are considered when modeling the events, what we suggest is modifying your tax report after getting your results, we currently don't have an alternative to it. 

    This article showcases a property tax case similar to what you mentioned, but like I mentioned above, modifying your detailed tax results is the workaround. 

    As for tax exemptions for purchases, when an organization buys supplies and inputs it normally pays tax on them (your electricity case) and default IMPLAN assumes an average in that industry. If the organization is exempt (in total or partially) you would still have to adjust the results so that tax isn't flowing out of its purchasing. 

    I hope this is helpful.

    Lauren

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