TIME OF THE ESSENCE? As you might recall, top tax writers had hoped to finish off the tax bill by today, which is the start of the new tax filing season. That was always quite ambitious, but lawmakers also tamped down some of the urgency by updating the tax bill to give the IRS the authority to amend returns to give taxpayers who already filed any extra child credit benefits they might deserve. Still, it’s easy to see the timing on this tax bill slipping, even if Johnson does end up putting it up for a vote this week. The Senate starts its two-week recess on Feb. 12, and GOP tax writers there have been pushing for their own mark-up for the Wyden-Smith plan. The tax bill’s major champions, like Wyden, believe that a big bipartisan vote in a historically gridlocked House could spur new momentum in the Senate. And what’s interesting is there seems to be little doubt that the package could clear the House without too much trouble, even under a procedure that requires a two-thirds vote. But one of the big questions, as it’s been since these tax talks intensified three weeks ago, is whether Johnson — a speaker still gaining his sea legs — sees this bill as worth the effort, particularly with the louder grumbling within his conference. ABOUT THAT FILING SEASON: IRS chief Danny Werfel is advising taxpayers not to wait until Congress might or might not act on that bill before filing their taxes — in no small part because of that increased authority that we noted above. “Taxpayers should file when they’re ready to file,” Werfel said in a Friday call with reporters. “If there is a change to the law that means, for example, they would get an additional or an increased credit, we will handle that at the IRS.” Now, how much that new authority affects the timeline on the Hill — like if it makes Senate supporters more open to a markup, if the bill does indeed pass the House — remains to be seen. Another tax bill issue: Heard about “Biden bucks?” That’s another growing concern among some on the right about this tax bill — that it would allow the Biden administration to send out new benefits to voters right before the president is up for re-election in November, as Joseph Zeballos-Roig of Semafor first reported last week. Experts from across the political spectrum have sought to refute those rumors, which might have started swirling after Erin Collins, the national taxpayer advocate, estimated that it might take the IRS up to six months to update its software and send out CTC refunds. Not so, according to Werfel: “We have communicated based on the latest versions of the bill that have been published that we can and will implement these tax provisions within weeks after they’re enacted,” he said. WE GOT THIS: Werfel made all those comments as he was also predicting that the extra funding that Democrats gave to the agency back in 2022 will make life easier for taxpayers. That new money, Werfel says, is going toward better customer service, expanded hours at taxpayer assistance centers and the digitization of IRS notices and communications. “The difference a well-funded IRS makes for taxpayers is like night and day,” the commissioner said on the call. Taxpayers can now file 20 tax forms completely online, including common business returns, the Treasury Department said in a release on the 2024 filing season. The IRS’s “Where’s My Refund” tool has gotten new updates as well, and the agency is now doing a much better job answering the telephone — though the national taxpayer advocate, an in-house watchdog, has said that the 85 percent success rate that the Biden administration and the IRS has been bragging about is overstated. ABOUT THAT ELECTION…: President Joe Biden is poised to make those 2017 GOP tax cuts more of a campaign issue as he gears up for a likely rematch with Donald Trump, our Adam Cancryn reports this morning. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has never been that popular, and the president’s campaign appears ready to try to contrast the TCJA with what’s become known as “Bidenomics.” That’s a sign of multiple things — that many voters still have their doubts about the current state of the economy, despite all the recent good news about it, and that Biden and his team believe that highlighting the corporate tax cuts in the 2017 tax law might help them tamp down the populist appeal of Trump. It might further help that Trump himself reportedly keeps bringing up that he wants to further cut the corporate rate, even as his advisers want him to emphasize the possibility of extending TCJA’s individual tax cuts, which expire at the end of next year. But even people within the Biden camp acknowledge that it might be difficult to make the campaign a choice on the economy rather than a referendum on the incumbent — in no small part because Trump can be “a little more slippery” on concrete policy matters, as one progressive analyst put it.
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