David Rosenbloom Speaks to Bloomberg on Treasury Fixing Tax Laws

The U.S. Department of Treasury has come under fire from Senate Democrats for giving away too much to companies in its regulations implementing the 2017 tax law’s international changes. The retort: blame your colleagues.

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But to a certain extent, it’s not up to Treasury to fix problems with the law, said H. David Rosenbloom, a member in Caplin & Drysdale Chartered’s Washington office who worked at Treasury in the 1970s and 1980s.

The department should address “egregious errors,” but its desire to use regulations to make the system work more coherently has, at times, led them to push the bounds of what might historically have been deemed appropriate, he said.

“That is problematic because, to the extent they go too far to the detriment of taxpayers, they will be challenged in court and may well lose but to the extent they are overly favorable there is no one to raise objection,” Rosenbloom said.

“That seems reason enough for them to curb their impulses to ‘correct’ a badly flawed statutory text,” he said.

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