Trump triggers IRS cut of 298 tax regulations

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced on Tuesday that it intends to eliminate 298 tax regulations that it has deemed unnecessary in an effort to meet President Donald Trump’s demand to reduce the regulatory burden.

The action by the IRS follows a pair of executive orders issued by Trump last year. One directed each government agency to conduct a review of existing regulations, while another instructed the IRS to simplify the tax code through deregulation.

The regulations the IRS has identified for removal have “no current or future applicability and, therefore, no longer provide useful guidance,” the agency said. The rules either apply to the old tax code, to provisions that have been significantly revised or are just no longer relevant. Some of the laws identified for removal have been outdated for decades.

By eliminating these rules, the agency says it can both reduce the number of regulations taxpayers need to review and improve the “clarity” of the new tax law.

The president has pushed deregulation as one of his administration’s top priorities, asserting during his first State of the Union address last month that his team has “eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration in history.”

The effort has not gone unnoticed.

According to a recent study by global financial services technology firm Koger, 56% of executives at hedge funds and private equity firms believe regulatory enforcement has decreased under the new administration. Eighty-five percent of respondents viewed the current U.S. regulatory environment as more lax than that of the country’s international counterparts.