Last week, National Taxpayers Union (NTU) President Pete Sepp testified before the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Small Business during their hearing on “Tax Reform: Ensuring that Main Street Isn’t Left Behind.”
Pete spoke about the serious challenges facing small business taxpayers, including simplifying an increasingly complex Tax Code and the need to introduce structural protections for small businesses. Offering a proposal that tax-writing committees should be required to quantify and publish the burdens of all proposals that add complexity – or savings for proposals that would simplify the law.
“As policymakers define the rates, bases, deductions, credits, and other features of a tax system, what will the practical impact be on taxpayers’ lives and their rights? Few sectors can be more deeply affected by the answer to this question than small business.”
Drawing the Committee Members’ attention to the $234 billion tax complexity burden slowing the American economy and limiting opportunities for small businesses. He also urged reforms that would automatically simplify the code, and others, like a Small Business Taxpayer Bill of Rights, that would protect small business owners from an unbalanced IRS enforcement burden.
Pete highlighted the startling fact that an unrivaled 75 percent of tax enforcement and litigation cases closed each year fell under the category of “Small Business and Self-Employed.”
“All too many Americans thought it was cheaper to pay what the IRS said they owed rather than fight.”
Additionally urging the Committee to work to stop the Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA), which represents the biggest threat to online small business owners on the horizon.