House Speaker Jason White acknowledged for the first time on Monday that House leaders knowingly passed a typo-riddled plan to overhaul Mississippi’s tax system that Senate leaders have since admitted was a mistake.

White also said his Republican caucus is willing to use a still-alive Senate bill to restart negotiations on some elements of the tax overhaul that could override the bill headed to Gov. Tate Reeves’ desk. The speaker appeared to underscore that last week’s typo tax snafu gave his House caucus the upper hand, and that they would extract further concessions from the Senate in exchange for restarting negotiations in a conference committee.

House leaders have pushed for years for eliminating the state personal income tax, and doing so in relatively short order. The Senate has urged a more cautious approach, saying it’s foolhardy to slash a third of the state’s revenue in uncertain economic times. Senators last week had conceded to eliminate the income tax, but only with economic growth “triggers” as safeguards — the tax wouldn’t phase out unless the state saw robust economic growth and controlled spending.

Or so they thought. The Senate bill had typos that essentially nullified the growth triggers and would eliminate the income tax nearly as quickly as the House proposed. The House passed the flawed bill on to the governor, who said he will sign it into law.

Speaker White on Monday confirmed for the first time when he and his caucus realized the Senate had sent them a bill with language different from what the chamber had intended to pass, even as he claimed he didn’t know what the Senate’s intentions were.

“Wednesday is when we knew. We met and we talked about it. Then we met as a Republican caucus and talked about it. And y’all heard the debate in here as the chairman called it up to concur,” White said.

The two chambers had appeared to remain dramatically far apart from a final compromise. White said his chamber was left in the dark by Senate leaders, who often call their chamber the “deliberative body.”

“You hear a lot about transparency, deliberateness,” White said. “It really wasn’t until after they passed it that were able to look at it, and they certainly didn’t talk to us about it on the front end.”

White said the Senate had communicated through multiple channels, including Senate Finance Chairman Josh Harkins, that the bill the upper chamber sent over would be their final offer. So he said the House to take the Senate at its word and send the bill with the Senate’s mistake to the governor.

“They said that’s it, we’re not going any further, we’ve barely got the votes, that sort of thing,”White said. “So that played into our decision. So do we take this, take them at their word that this is it, or do we invite conference and see if they can get this fragile vote count together again on their end?”

The House on Thursday morning surprised the Senate, unaware of its typos, by voting to agree with the Senate’s latest plan.

But lobbyists, legislators and the media soon discovered the reason the House hurried to pass the Senate plan is because senators inadvertently inserted decimal points that essentially rendered the growth triggers meaningless and would almost ensure a quicker timeline for eliminating the income tax.

“After they passed it, we got theirs amended and sent to them, then we sat down and started looking at theirs, and we, I mean, it’s page six and seven,” White said. “It’s the first thing you see when you get into the meat of the bill … So it was pretty apparent once you read it, you’re like ‘that trigger doesn’t seem as cumbersome as what has been explained or talked about.’ So we’re like, we can live with this.”

Now, Senate leaders are hoping they can convince the House to correct the mistake, but it appears that might not be an easy sell with the House.

“We are willing to talk about a reasonable trigger, but not a cumbersome trigger that nobody can ever hit,” White said. “Of course, if we’re going to revisit that, there are other features of the tax reform package that we would certainly like to address as well.”

Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann told Mississippi Today he would not talk about the bill and deferred comments to Harkins, the chamber’s lead tax-cut architect. Hosemann last week feigned ignorance about the typo and tried to claim victory over the final product.

On Monday, Harkins, a Republican from Flowood, took responsibility for the error but said he hoped House leaders would work with the Senate to “clarify any ambiguity” about the “growth trigger” language because it was not what the Senate meant to propose to the House.

But it appears House leaders, who have expressed frustration with the GOP-majority Senate this year for killing a lot of its major policy proposals, want the Senate to reverse course and pass some policies that they have otherwise been hesitant to agree to.

If negotiations were to resume, the House hopes to use its leverage to force the Senate into adopting its preferred approach to changing the structure of the Public Employees Retirement System, which had been a key wedge issue between the chambers in their negotiations over tax reform. The Senate wants to cut benefits for future public employees while the House wants to divert about $100 million a year in state lottery money to the system.

Harkins was not asked about White’s specific comments on the public employee retirement system. Still, he told reporters, in general terms, he did not think there was any appetite in the Senate to dedicate a recurring revenue stream to the retirement system.

The Rankin County senator stopped shy of rebuking House leaders for how they handled the tax bill, as some have done behind the scenes. But he questioned whether his fellow GOP House colleagues “worked in good faith” to deliver a final compromise.

“In legislating, when you’re asked to work in good faith to help get to a position, and you do so, I think there should be some mutual respect on both sides,” Harkins said. “We’re both trying to get to a policy that we can both agree on.”

When asked if he was concerned senators might feel burned by the House leadership, White said: “If they were misled, it was on that end of the building. There was no misleading from down here. They amended our bill as they saw fit.”

Harkins also said that he met with Lamar, his House counterpart, sometime around Friday, March 14, to discuss what the Senate planned to propose regarding trigger language, though he was still ironing out specific details. The two chambers then passed their different proposals the following Tuesday.

Gov. Reeves has said on social media that he intends to pass the mistake-filled bill into law. The growth triggers, under the plan, would not take effect for four years. So lawmakers could try and address the mistakes in future sessions.

Given the four-year window before triggers would take effect, White said legislators didn’t necessarily have to reach an agreement. They could instead tweak the bill when “you would conceivably have other leadership in place.”

by Michael Goldberg and Taylor Vance