WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service are seeking recommendations for items that should be included on the 2014-2015 priority guidance plan.
They use the plan "to identify and prioritize the tax issues that should be addressed through regulations, revenue rulings, revenue procedures, notices, and other published administrative guidance,"
Recommendations should be submitted by May 1. They can be mailed to the IRS, hand-delivered to the IRS courier's desk or submitted electronically via the Federal Rulemaking Portal.
"Published guidance plays an important role in increasing voluntary compliance by helping to clarify ambiguous areas of tax law," the notice said. "The published guidance process is most successful if the Treasury Department and the Service have the benefit of the experience and knowledge of taxpayers and practitioners who must apply the rules implementing the internal revenue laws."
The current guidance plan includes several items relating to tax-exempt bonds. One is guidance about the definition of a political subdivision for purposes of tax-exempt, direct-pay and tax-credit bond provisions. This issue has become a particular concern since the IRS issued a technical advice memorandum in May arguing that the Village Center Community Development District in Florida is not a political subdivision that can issue tax-exempt bonds because its board does not, and will not, include elected officials.
The current plan also includes guidance on reallocations of new clean renewable energy bonds, a variety of private-activity bond issues, temporary relief for declared disasters, and regulations on bond reissuance.
In the past year, Treasury and the IRS published proposed arbitrage regulations, including the widely criticized proposed issue price rules. They also published guidance relating to relief from storms in Oklahoma and Colorado.
When reviewing recommendations and choosing which projects will be included in the 2014-2015 priority guidance plan, the IRS and Treasury stated they will consider six factors.
The first is whether the recommended guidance would resolve major issues relevant to many taxpayers. The second is whether the guidance would promote "sound tax administration," the IRS said.
The agencies also will consider if recommended guidance can be drafted in a way that taxpayers would be able to easily understand and apply. In addition, they will look at whether a recommendation "involves regulations that are outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome and that should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed," the agencies said in their notice.
Further, they will examine whether it could administer the recommended guidance uniformly as well as if the guidance would reduce controversy and lessen the burden on taxpayers or the IRS.
Allen Robertson, president of the National Association of Bond Lawyers, said the group typically submits a formal response to the IRS and Treasury about what it would like to see on the plan, but it will likely be submitted closer to the deadline.
