House panel to hold hearing examining GOP tax law regulations affecting corporations

The House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday announced that it is set to hold a hearing next week titled “The Disappearing Corporate Income Tax,” as Democrats have expressed concerns about the amount of taxes large companies are paying under President Trump’s 2017 tax-cut law.

The hearing, scheduled for Feb. 11, will examine regulations implementing portions of the 2017 tax law that affect large corporations “and how those regulations might result in even lower taxes for large companies,” said Erin Hatch, a spokeswoman for Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.).

The hearing will also compare IRS audit rates of large corporations with those for low-income taxpayers claiming the earned income tax credit, Hatch said.

The hearing comes after The New York Times published an article late last year reporting that the Treasury Department issued regulations about the international provisions of the GOP tax law that will allow companies to have smaller tax bills than had been anticipated when Trump signed the law, following a lobbying blitz by corporations.

The Times’s article caught the attention of Democrats, who voted against Trump’s tax law because they thought it disproportionately benefited corporations and wealthy individuals. A group of Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee last month sent a letter to Treasury and the White House Office of Management and Budget, seeking information about the extent to which lobbying influenced the rules on the GOP tax law provisions. 

At the time that the Times article was published, Treasury spokeswoman Monica Crowley issued a statement calling the article “unbalanced.” She said that Treasury met with stakeholders as part of the rule-making process but that the department wasn’t influenced by any specific company.

The witnesses for the Ways and Means Committee hearing have yet to be announced.