Lankford Questions IRS Commissioner on “Flexible” Regulations that Prioritize China Putting American Businesses at a Disadvantage

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WASHINGTON, DC - Senator James Lankford (R-OK) today participated in a Senate Finance hearing entitled, "The President's Fiscal Year 2025 IRS Budget and the IRS 2024 Filing Season," with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Danny Werfel. Lankford sounded the alarm on the IRS's flexible regulations and detailed how they put American companies at a disadvantage.

He also discussed the Charitable Act that would expand and extend the expired non-itemized deduction for charitable giving. This bill seeks to incentivize giving and ensure Americans who donate to charities, houses of worship, religious organizations, and other nonprofits of their choice are able to deduct that donation from their federal taxes at a higher level than the previous $300 deduction.

Lankford previously introduced legislation with his colleagues and called on the IRS to stop snooping through Venmo accounts.

Excerpt

Lankford on How IRS Selective Rule Making Disadvantages American Companies: Senator Cassidy was just asking about the Venmo requirements, and my Democratic colleagues added in the Inflation Reduction Act that there'd be additional new reporting on people that actually uses Venmo and that there would be new filing requirements and such that would come from that. You expressed that there's a flexibility on that interpretation, based on other statutes on this. This is part of the challenge that we're dealing with right now is the flexible side of things. And try to determine what is something that can be counted on and how that's actually interpreting where it goes.

Sitting at that exact same table, just a few weeks ago, was a business leader from the Huntsman Corporation talking about they were doing some chemical manufacturing for EV batteries. But, the tax credit piece, the 30D Clean Vehicle Credit the foreign entity of concern restriction that was out there dealing with that, was waived for China by Treasury and by IRS so that company, that was an American company, no longer was competitive because the Chinese company was now competitive, even though the statute itself says that that's not allowed.

…Where I'm headed on this is, this Administration took out what's called the OIRA review for the IRS for new regulations. Obviously, the previous Administration had an additional review. This Administration took that out. My question is why is it a bad thing for the IRS to be able to have OIRA review for regulations they're putting in when you've expressed the flexibility that you have to be able to do that, but every other entity needs to have OIRA review to be able to have some kind of review under the AdministrativeProcedure Act?

Lankford Emphasizes Importance of Encouraging Charitable Giving: As you and I've talked about before, I work a lot on charitable giving. This is an issue that I think is important that we incentivize Americans in our tax code. It's something that will come up in our conversation next year when we're dealing with a lot of tax policy issues, but it's an area that we do need to get some insight from the IRS on what is happening in charitable giving. It is our understanding that after we stopped incentivizing charitable giving through our tax code, we had a dramatic drop in this in charitable giving across the country, which hurts our nonprofits, which hurts that big safety net. We want to be able to get more information from you on that. We'll follow up on that in the days ahead.

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