That’s good news for American taxpayers. As a stalwart supporter of President Trump’s agenda to eliminate burdensome Biden Administration policies and as a longtime tax specialist myself, a last-minute Biden-era regulation still plaguing the IRS is deeply concerning to me and should be brought to the DOGE team as they review unnecessary regulation and enforcement.
The regulation, issued in the waning days of Biden’s time in office, targets basis shifting, a commonly used, tax code-compliant, business strategy to shift assets in advance of a sale or transfer in a way that best positions companies to be successful – success that leads to the hiring of more workers and spurs a thriving business economy. On top of the regulation, career staff at the IRS make up a brand new specialized investigative unit tasked with imposing a host of unnecessary and confusing reporting requirements for partnerships engaging in the practice, and it’s causing serious problems.
Companies are being given just months to comb through six years of unremarkable transactions, with the ridiculous threat of a $50,000 fine per transaction, per participant, bearing down on them if the IRS summarily claims non-compliance. Instead of using the billions allocated to the IRS by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to modernize their systems, the IRS is wasting these funds to pay for the investigatory unit charged with redundant reporting requirements that hamper American businesses, damage that trickles down to the average consumer.
It’s not American partnerships that are engaging unlawful behavior that needs to be stopped, it’s the bloated, inefficient and overly invasive IRS itself. Instead of addressing the millions of overdue tax refunds owed to working Americans that are a result of overwhelming backlogs at the agency, agents are being forced to waste their time on meritless and needless endeavors that not one elected representative had the chance to weigh in on.
These are facts that Representative Jason Smith strongly pointed out last month in a scathing letter to the acting IRS commissioner. Rep. Smith correctly noted that the IRS pushed “through numerous regulations in the final days of the Biden Administration” and failed to modernize despite a $80 billion slush fund from the IRA that instead “circumvented the congressional appropriations process and prioritized aggressive audits over customer service.” In the same letter, Rep. Smith warned that “business as usual at the IRS is unacceptable.” As chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, Rep. Smith is not only fighting for Missouri taxpayers, but all American taxpayers to ensure fairness from the IRS. And with his leadership, I’m confident Biden era bureaucratic holdovers targeting business owners will come to a swift end. President Trump should quickly rescind this regulation and shutter the rogue special investigative unit created to target partnerships.
Missouri politician who was a member of the Missouri House of Representatives from 2019 to 2025 and who served as Vice Chairman of Fiscal Review Committee.
