President Donald Trump’s deregulation efforts continue to gain ground, as an announcement from the U.S. Treasury this week made clear.
On April 21, 2017, Trump issued an executive order directing the Secretary of the Treasury to review all significant tax regulations issued by the department since 2016 and identify those that:
- “impose an undue financial burden on United States taxpayers”
- “add undue complexity to the Federal tax laws”
- “exceed the statutory authority of the Internal Revenue Service”
Then the Secretary was ordered to take “take appropriate steps” to mitigate those regulatory burdens — including “to cause the effective date of such regulations to be delayed or suspended, to the extent permitted by law, and to modify or rescind such regulations as appropriate and consistent with law.”
Early this week Treasury Sec. Steven Mnuchin announced the results of this review: nearly 300 rules targeted for removal. An additional 79 rules would be amended.
Washington Examiner reports that Treasury targeted rules it deemed “unnecessary, duplicative or obsolete” or that “force taxpayers to navigate needlessly complex or confusing rules.”
In the notice issued today, Treasury said, “This notice of proposed rule making proposes to streamline IRS regulations by removing 298 regulations that are no longer necessary because they do not have any current or future applicability under the Internal Revenue Code and by amending 79 regulations to reflect the proposed removal of the 298 regulations. The proposed removal and amendment of these regulations may affect various categories of taxpayers.” …
In a statement, Treasury said that the three categories targeted are:
- Regulations interpreting provisions of the Code that have been repealed.
- Regulations interpreting provisions that have been significantly revised and the existing regulations do not account for these revisions.
- Regulations that are no longer applicable.
