Topeka ? In a letter to the Ephesians, the apostle Paul admonished fellow Christians to avoid “fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness.”

The Legislature does not heed that message in drafting tax policy. What emerges in the frantic final hours of a legislative session, between sundown and dawn, sometimes is seriously flawed.

Before legislators approved a bill this year to renew the state’s property tax levy for public schools, they dropped in a proposal to repeal a “succession” tax paid by some heirs.

Lawmakers had imposed the tax only last year, in hopes of raising $15 million to plug a hole in the state budget. The money didn’t materialize, and the Department of Revenue said it could not enforce the tax because of how the law was written.

The law had to be fixed or repealed, meaning legislators spent time this year cleaning up a muddle made last year.

Yet legislators ignored the lesson and hurried through drafting more legislation this year — sometimes without significant hearings or much debate.

“They shouldn’t, but they do these things,” said Sen. Dave Corbin, R-Towanda, chairman of the Senate Assessment and Taxation Committee.

The wrong way

Legislators demonstrated how not to handle tax policy last year when they enacted the new succession tax and repealed a sales tax exemption for some computer software sales.

Both measures emerged as issues late in the session, as legislators struggled to find revenue to keep the state budget in balance. Neither received lengthy hearings; legislative leaders expedited the passage of both by short-circuiting the normal process.

The succession tax was so named because it applied to the “privilege of succeeding” in ownership of property from any relative or “stranger in the blood” who is not the spouse, sibling or child of the deceased.

The tax was 10 percent on the first $100,000 of property value, 12 percent on the portion between $100,000 and $200,000, and 15 percent on any portion above $200,000.

Missing from the law were provisions giving the Department of Revenue the authority to audit those who might owe the tax and to place liens against the property of the delinquent.

“I think they just wrote something they thought would work,” said Steve Stotts, the department’s director of taxation. “It probably should have taken them more time.”

Legislators acknowledge that the proposal popped up in the last days of the session and only because of budget problems, not because of any sense that it would be fair to impose the new tax.

“I thought personally that it needed more study,” said Rep. Bruce Larkin, D-Baileyville, one of the tax negotiators. “But it was something the whole leadership agreed should be done.”

The $15 million estimate of revenues that the tax would produce during the current fiscal year proved inflated. Without enforcement mechanisms, the department said, it could collect only $5 million.

Simpler doesn’t mean better

The computer software tax seemed simpler, but it now appears unlikely to raise the anticipated $18 million.

Until last year, Kansas law provided an exemption for “the initial sale of any custom computer program” that was “originally developed for the exclusive use of a single end user.” People who went to a store and purchased something off the shelf paid the tax.

The proposal involved only striking 10 lines in the Kansas sales tax law. But lawmakers did not consider whether the tax would apply when one subsidiary of a company provided software to another subsidiary, and billed for it.

This year, officials at Sprint Corp. lobbied — ultimately unsuccessfully — to reinstate the exemption, arguing that last year’s policy was too broad.

“Probably, somebody should have been screaming, but people weren’t,” House Taxation Committee Chairman John Edmonds, R-Great Bend, said of last year’s debate.

During the past decade, leaders have made the Legislature’s rules flexible enough to allow them to drop pretty much any proposal into any bill they can find during the session’s final hours.

Such a process is maddening to follow, because an idea can travel from out of nowhere to the governor’s desk in a day, starting in one bill and ending up in a completely different one, as pressure mounts on legislative staff to work faster. Thoughtful deliberations — not to mention public hearings — often are sacrificed.

Edmonds likened it to making a daiquiri by hastily dumping ingredients into a blender, hitting the “on” switch and hoping the machine comes up with something tasty.

“The process, I think, is not perhaps inherently conducive to a calm, rational discussion of policy issues,” he said.