Now that the GOP tax plan is law, the IRS must figure out how it works

A 1040 tax form
(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

President Trump signed the GOP tax bill into law on Friday, and now the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service must negotiate its implementation.

"The [regulatory] process has got to be thorough but prompt," former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson told The Hill, even as confusion over the new system prompts "a flood of calls into the call centers." The new law makes a number of major changes to the tax code, including cutting the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent, lowering income tax rates for six of seven tax brackets, and doubling the standard deduction.

The IRS will need to update tax forms and withholding procedure, and changes will be made more complicated by the agency's decades-old technology. "A lot of our forms are hard-coded," explained former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, "so you don't just enter a little thing in your computer, you actually have to go into the code and change the date or change the forms."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.