West Virginia HB 4588 would direct the State Treasurer to run the state's participation in the federal Scholarship Tax Credit, accept SGO applications year-round, and publish a list of qualified organizations by December 1 each year. It cleared the House and the Senate but died in a conference committee when the 2026 regular session adjourned on March 14.
West Virginia came within one procedural step of designating the office that would carry out the federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC / ECCA / §25F) inside the state, and then ran out of clock. House Bill 4588, titled “relating to participating in the federal tax credit scholarship program,” adds a new Article 31A, “The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program,” to Chapter 18 of the state code (sections 18-31A-1 through 18-31A-6). Lead sponsor Del. Adam Burkhammer (R-District 64) and his co-sponsors wrote the bill to direct the West Virginia State Treasurer to participate in the federal credit established under section 70411 of Public Law No. 119-21, the §25F provision enacted in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The House passed it on March 4, 2026 (Roll No. 288) and the Senate passed it on March 13, 2026 (Roll No. 539), but the two chambers split over the Senate's amendments, and the bill went to a conference committee on March 14, the session's sine die adjournment date, with no recorded final passage or signature.
The mechanism HB 4588 sets up is administrative, not fiscal. Rather than creating a state tax credit or making a discretionary opt-in election, the bill designates the State Treasurer as the office responsible for the program: under section 18-31A-1, the Treasurer would participate in the federal credit under section 70411, accept applications from scholarship granting organizations on a year-round basis, and by December 1 of each year submit to the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and publish on the Treasurer's website a list of qualified SGOs and schools. The bill text itself never uses the label “§25F” or cites the $1,700 donor credit cap; those are the federal framing around the program it points to. What West Virginia was deciding here was which state officer maintains the qualified-SGO list that Treasury relies on, a question of plumbing that determines how smoothly donors and organizations can actually use the credit once it launches on January 1, 2027.
For SGOs and donors, that designation question is not academic. The federal program runs on each state's list of qualified scholarship granting organizations, and an organization cannot receive credit-eligible donations in a state until it appears on the list that state submits to Treasury. HB 4588 would have given West Virginia a clear owner for that process, the Treasurer's office, with a year-round application window and a fixed December 1 publication deadline, so operators would know exactly where to apply and when the roster is finalized. Founders weighing whether to organize in West Virginia can track the state's status on our West Virginia state page and against the national participation map, review who is already operating in our directory of scholarship granting organizations, and start with the primer on how §25F works. Operators who do clear a state list still need to run the program day to day, and §25F-native software handles the donor receipts, allocation, and reporting the credit requires.
A note of caution on the margins: the official action history confirms the roll-call numbers and that both chambers passed the bill, and contemporaneous accounts described unanimous votes (93-0 in the House, 33-0 in the Senate), but those numeric tallies should be read against the roll-call sheets before being treated as settled. What is not in doubt is how the bill died. On March 14 the House refused to concur in the Senate amendments, and the measure went to conference, with Senators Rucker, Roberts, and Woelfel and Delegates Criss, Gearheart, and Williams named as conferees, before the session adjourned without a final vote. A Senate companion, SB 644 from Sen. Patricia Rucker (R-District 16), carried identical State Treasurer, section 70411, and December 1 language and met the same end.
West Virginia now sits among the states that came close without finishing. Its near-miss is a different kind of story from the states that have already locked participation in: Virginia and Florida opted in by a governor's pen, while Kentucky, Kansas, and North Carolina forced the program through over their governors' vetoes. By June 2026 the IRS had published an official list of 27 states that had made the advance election, and West Virginia was not on it because HB 4588 never crossed the finish line. The structure the bill built, a single state officer maintaining the qualified-SGO list on an annual cycle, is the kind of administrative scaffolding nearly every participating state will need, so expect West Virginia lawmakers to bring the Treasurer-designation language back when they reconvene. We will track it on the West Virginia page when they do.
