By SLADE BLACKWELL / Guest Columnist

If you are a business owner in the state of Alabama, you recently received a letter from the Department of Revenue notifying you that beginning Oct. 1, 2013, businesses can file their taxes through the new Optional Network Election for Single Point Online Transactions system. This provides Alabama businesses with the ease of filing their monthly county and city sales, use and rental taxes, along with state taxes through a single website at one time.

As a business owner myself, I was proud to sponsor the ONESPOT legislation to ensure that we improve the way businesses operate. The ONESPOT system is optional to all businesses and completely up to the business owner or retailer whether they choose to continue filing them as always or use the new option in an effort to save time and require less paper work.

The My Alabama Taxes portal on the Alabama Department of Revenue web site will allow you to register your business by accessing Myalabamataxes.alabama.gov.

State and many local taxes, including those administered by the state and those for 20 of the counties and cities that serve as their own administrators, can now be filed and remitted through My Alabama Taxes – regardless of who administers those taxes.

My legislative colleagues and I have been in discussions about how we can build on the success of ONESPOT so that we continue to improve the business climate in Alabama. We are currently working to finalize the Alabama Business License Reform Act, which I plan to sponsor in the upcoming session, and have created a subcommittee to study and make recommendations for improving these laws for businesses in Alabama.

The Business License Reform Act will simplify Alabama’s business license laws by consolidating and eliminating more than a hundred existing state and county business licenses and calls for the Department to create a system where businesses can obtain their state business license, and eventually, all county and municipal business licenses.

We must continue to streamline the way businesses have to deal with government bureaucracy in Alabama in order to improve existing businesses but also encourage others to locate here in the future.

Slade Blackwell represents parts of Shelby and Jefferson counties in the Alabama State Senate.