In the last few weeks of 2019 Congress produced its most significant tax package of the year as part of the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020 (HR 1865).[1] The President signed the Act into law on December 20, 2019. The Act includes primarily appropriations provisions for various federal agencies, but it has significant tax provisions in the following Divisions:

Division N – Health and Human Services Extenders, Title I-Health and Human Services Extenders, Subtitle E – Revenue Provisions: This portion of the Act repeals three taxes originally enacted as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act but which had not yet gone into force.
Division O – Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE): The bill that passed the House earlier this year dealing with various retirement provisions, including major changes to required distributions for inherited IRAs, delayed required beginning date for required minimum distributions, other provisions affecting qualified retirement plans, expansion of items §529 plan distributions can be used for as education expenses and returning to the pre-TCJA version of the Kiddie Tax.
Division Q – Revenue Provisions (Taxpayer Certainty and Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2019): The largest portion of this section of the Act contains extenders, some retroactive, of various provisions that had expired or were scheduled to expire, including the ability to treat certain private mortgage insurance as interest on acquisition debt, the nonbusiness energy credit and many others. As well the bill adds disaster relief provisions for disasters taking place in 2018, 2019 and the very early portion of 2020 and retroactively repeals the rule treating transportation benefits provided to employees of a tax exempt entity as unrelated business income (a portion of the “parking lot tax” provision added by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act).

Our weekly podcast for December 23 will give an overview of this Act and we are working on a four hour continuing education session to be given on this topic at the Arizona Society of CPA’s offices on January 8 that will also be webcast. The session has tentatively been scheduled to begin at 8:00 Mountain Standard Time that morning, with details to be available early the week of December 23.

4 Hour Update Information

Four hour sessions (with a 100+ page reference manual) on this Act will be given as noted below.

Arizona Society of CPAs

The Arizona Society will host both an in-person session at their offices and a webcast the morning of January 8, 2020.

Registrations:

Idaho Society of CPAs

The Idaho Society of CPAs will host a four hour webcast on January 14.

Registration:

Webcast

[1] HR 1865, Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020, Signed into law December 20, 2019, https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hr1865/BILLS-116hr1865enr.pdf (retrieved December 22, 2019)