As many of you are aware, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is floating a proposal in Congress that seeks to increase taxpayer compliance by having financial institutions report additional account holder information. The IRS has indicated they believe this would result in approximately $460 billion in revenue being collected over a 10-year period that otherwise would not be collected. These dollars would be used to offset a portion of the cost of the $3.5 trillion human infrastructure bill currently under consideration. At the moment, this is still just a proposal and it would need to be incorporated into legislation, passed by both chambers of Congress, and signed into law by the President before it could become reality and implemented by the IRS. That said, this threat is still very real and we need to meet this challenge accordingly as an industry.
Late last week and early this week, the House Ways & Means Committee met to draft their part of the $3.5 trillion bill. The Committee has jurisdiction over tax/revenue raising matters and proponents of the IRS proposal had hoped the Committee would include legislative text for the proposal in the Committee’s draft. Thankfully, because of concerns from members of the committee on both sides of the aisle, including our own Rep. Dan Kildee (D-MI-5), the Committee’s leadership decided against putting the proposal in the bill. Proponents are expected to continue to try to add the text of the proposal or a variation of it to the bill during other stages of the legislative process, perhaps by asking the House Rules Committee to include it or by attempting to add it on the House Floor. We also understand there may be support for it in the Senate. So, we need to keep an eye on the process until it’s finished and make sure credit union voices continue to be heard on the Hill.
CUNA has developed the attached talking points to help explain the proposal, its current status and potential impact on credit unions and CU members. CUNA has also created an action alert for credit unions to contact their members of Congress to express their concern and opposition to the IRS data gathering proposal.
The action alert can be found here, and we strongly encourage you to use this tool to reach out to your Representatives and our two U.S. Senators’ offices
Finally, we wanted to mention that some Michigan credit unions and CU’s across the country have posted about this issue on their Facebook pages and directed their Facebook followers to CUNA’s action alert. This has resulted in a significant number of post shares and emails into Congress. This is excellent news! Should you be interested in doing this as well, please see the attached sample Facebook post from CUNA that can be used and linked to their action alert.
Please feel free to reach out to Todd Jorns (todd.jorns@mcul.org) or anyone on our MCUL Advocacy Team if you have any questions or concerns.
Sincerely,
Kieran P. Marion
Senior Vice President of Advocacy
Michigan Credit Union League & Affiliates
