|
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Tax Reform Panel to Report in Late October
Treasury Secretary John Snow announced yesterday that the President's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform will delay its tax report until the end of October. This delay apparently comes at the request of the administration, who Snow said is concerned that a sooner release would doom it to the "back pages" of newspapers because of the extensive coverage we are currently seeing with Hurricane Katrina aftermath. Another Treasury spokesman said that with such a full agenda, "there is little capacity for public focus on the full debate and dialogue that this key presidential priority deserves."
While finding ways to reform the tax code is important, it is hard to tell if the panel and their work is going to have any impact whatsoever. Not much information is available regarding what exact recommendations they are supposed to make to the Treasury Department. The panel has been extremely vague about their actions; in their emails announcing meetings they say they will be discussing "issues surrounding tax reform," and rarely do they delve much deeper than that. BNA has reported that Snow expects they will work to fix the laws relating to the alternative minimum tax, but few other policy priorities are known.
We will see with the release of the report in October what exactly the tax panel has in mind. After that, it will be up to Congress and the President to find the time to even make tax reform a priority, or else this panel's report will do little more than collect dust.
Posted by Becky Lewis
|