It’s “budget season!” On January 16th, Governor Cuomo released the FY 2019 Executive Budget, which is available here, and one day later the Department of Taxation and Finance issued a preliminary report on consequences of the Federal Tax reform and possible legislative responses, which can be found here. We blogged about some of this last month. Then, just last week, in his “30-day amendments” to the FY 2019 Executive Budget, we got to see more of the Governor’s proposals take shape. Now the dust has somewhat settled on all these proposals, so let’s take a look. The highlights of the proposed amendments, which include a new optional Employer Compensation Expense Tax system, increasing the options for charitable deductions, and provisions designed to decouple the state tax code from the federal tax code, are summarized below.