Legality of potential payroll tax move seen as ‘dubious’ – By Doug Sword (Roll Call) / Aug 3 2020
Trump allies push to suspend payroll tax if Congress won’t; experts from right and left say they’d be on shaky ground
Tax policy experts doubt that President Donald Trump has the authority to unilaterally suspend payroll tax collections, an idea floated by White House economic adviser Stephen Moore over the weekend.
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Moore wrote that the president should declare a “national economic emergency” due to COVID-19 and use emergency powers that allowed the IRS to delay tax filing deadlines earlier this year to also suspend payroll tax collections for up to one year. Moore doesn’t have a formal role in the Trump administration but is a member of the president’s economic recovery task force.
Moore’s reading of the law drew criticisms from tax experts at both the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank backed by the center-left Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute.
Mark Mazur, director of the Tax Policy Institute, who was assistant secretary for tax policy during the Obama administration, said only Congress could halt the collection of taxes.
Continue to article: https://rollcall.com/2020/08/03/legality-of-potential-payroll-tax-move-seen-as-dubious/
