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."