Bipartisan House bill would fix GOP tax law’s ‘retail glitch’

A bipartisan group of House members on Tuesday offered legislation to fix a portion of President Trump’s 2017 tax law that is hurting retailers and restaurants.

The bill — introduced by House Ways and Means Committee members Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) — would fix a portion of the GOP tax law known as the “retail glitch” that pertains to the time frame in which stores and restaurants can deduct the costs of their renovations.

{mosads}”Our bill will allow restaurants, retailers, and other businesses to make the improvements they need to keep their stores competitive and safe and plan for the future,” Panetta said in a statement.

Senators introduced a version of the bill in the upper chamber earlier this month.

Prior to the enactment of the tax law, businesses could write off the costs of improvements to their facilities over the course of 15 years. The authors of the tax law intended for the measure to allow businesses to write off the full costs of renovations in the year in which they were made. However, because of an apparent drafting error, retailers and restaurants instead have to write off the costs of their investments over 39 years.

The bill would allow retailers and restaurants to be able to immediately deduct the cost of renovations, as lawmakers had intended when they crafted the tax law. The Joint Committee on Taxation has said the bill would not have an impact on the federal deficit.

Walorski said that the bill “is a small but critical fix for our job creators, and technical corrections like this are a normal part of the process when Congress enacts major reforms.”

Several other House members on both sides of the aisle are co-sponsoring the bill. Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Doug Jones (D-Ala.) introduced a companion bill in the Senate earlier this month.

It’s unclear exactly when legislation making technical corrections to the GOP tax law will be enacted. Many Democrats have said they want corrections to be paired with more substantive changes to the 2017 law.