Homeowners hit with repair costs because tainted concrete used in their foundations and basements is crumbling have more time now to claim their loss as as a deduction on their federal income taxes.
Taxpayers now have through the end of the year 2020 to make qualified repairs to their home and until April 2021 to claim those repairs on an amended 2017 federal tax return under IRS rules issued Wednesday.
The IRS had been saying that the deduction went away with the tax reforms signed into law in December, and the 2017 tax year was taxpayer's last chance to claim them.
Generally speaking, taxpayers have three years from the date they filed their original tax return to file Form 1040X and amend their return.
The offices of U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, and Connecticut Democrats Rep. Joe Courtney and Rep. John Larson announced the changes.
Neal, the ranking Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways & Means Committee, helped Larson and Courtney secure the tax deduction back when the faulty concrete was a chiefly Connecticut crisis. Official word came from the IRS on the deduction only in November 2017.
Then the new federal tax plan was signed into law in December and it did away with provision in tax law the IRS used to grant the deduction.
This gave homeowners about a month to make the repairs, which can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Contractors have to jack up the house, dig out the bad concrete and replace it.
Massachusetts homeowners are now coming forward saying they, too, are seeing the telltale cracks that develop in the tainted concrete.
According to reports issued by the state of Connecticut over the past two years, a company called Becker Quarry in Willington sold the pyrrhotite-contaminated stone through its now-defunct JJ Mottes concrete company from 1983 until 2017, when they agreed to stop.
Pyrrhotite reacts over time with water and oxygen. The concrete swells then cracks and is completely useless.
Of the 34,000 homes in Connecticut believed to have been built with the faulty concrete, more than 500 homeowners have stepped forward with complaints.
No one knows how many Massachusetts homes have pyrrhotite. But there are reports of it in East Longmeadow, Longmeadow, Monson, Palmer, Wales and Ware.
In Longmeadow alone, 400 homes -- about 10 percent of Longmeadow's housing stock -- were built between 1983 and 2017 when the tainted concrete aggregate was in use.
