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Talking Taxes in a Truck Episode 43: EY’s Dianne Mehany Decodes the Big Beautiful Bill

With the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Working Families Tax Cut?) officially the law of the land, how are private companies responding? And where does tax policy go from here?  We invited EY Private National Tax Leader Dianne Mehany to the podcast to discuss those questions and more. Dianne breaks down the key provisions and how they’re playing with clients (199A, SALT, estate tax). Later we discuss the legislative outlook, new country-by-country reporting requirements, and the advantages of a Ford F-150 over Uber.

2025-09-17T20:43:44+00:00September 17, 2025|

House Hearing on CTA Regs, Database Purge

Earlier this week we covered the latest effort in Congress to make things right when it comes to the Corporate Transparency Act. That starts with deleting the beneficial owner database that’s not just unnecessary but actively puts millions of Americans’ sensitive information at risk.

Thanks in large part to Congressman Warren Davidson, who chairs the Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions, we now have a bit more clarity on where things stand. At a hearing convened Tuesday, FinCEN Director Andrea Gacki offered the following response to a question from the panel:

Along with

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2025-09-12T15:47:43+00:00September 12, 2025|

Purging the CTA Database

Couple important developments to report on the Corporate Transparency Act front.

First, around 90 members of Congress yesterday sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging that the CTA database be purged entirely. It makes clear:

As Congress works to provide long-term relief from the CTA, we urge the Department of Treasury and FinCEN to promulgate a final rule that exempts U.S. businesses from the CTA. We also acknowledge that millions of U.S. small businesses have already registered with FinCEN. This data must be immediately destroyed to protect the privacy of small business owners.

The letter underscores the reality that

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2025-09-09T14:58:23+00:00September 9, 2025|

A Sustainable Alternative to Tariffs

One of the nice things about tax policy is that it’s constrained by math. You can push any tax policy you want, but at some point the underlying math will win out.

So while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick might argue that we could replace our income tax with tariff receipts, the math says something else. Here’s The Spectator on the numbers:

…Americans reported $15 trillion in income in 2021, on which they paid $2.2 trillion in income taxes for an average tax rate of 14.9 percent. In the same year, goods imports were $2.8 trillion, generating $80 billion in revenue

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2025-08-21T16:24:31+00:00August 21, 2025|

Horizontal Equity and Section 199A

Thanks to the OB3, Section 199A is now a permanent fixture of the Tax Code. Millions of small and family-owned businesses can now stop worrying about their taxes and refocus on growing and hiring.  It’s a good thing that means more investment and jobs on Main Street.

That doesn’t mean the debate is over, however.

A Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, for example, included a nice overview of the provision, but also made a point about horizontal equity we’ve seen previously:

The deduction may diminish horizontal tax equity in two ways. First, it taxes wage earners and pass-through business owners

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2025-08-15T13:40:54+00:00August 15, 2025|