Following up on his campaign promise to pare back the federal regulatory process, yesterday, during a meeting of small business owners, President Trump signed an executive order (attached) limiting the issuance of new federal regulations and rulings.
As is typical of the tone of other executive orders issued in his first few days of office, this order is short and to the point. Specifically, it mandates that each agency must repeal two existing regulations in exchange for any new one. A budgetary process will be employed that will identify the cost associated with the new regulation. While historically new regulations require the approval of the OMB (Office of Management and Budget), now the OMB must confirm that the cost of the two repealed regulations will offset the cost of the new one; this obviously intended to prevent an agency from picking a couple of nondescript regs to throw away when implementing an impactful new one. The term “regulation” appears to be broadly defined to extend not just toward formal regulation formats, but includes any pronouncement that could impact current law or policy. We assume for example, looking at IRS protocol, such things as IRS notices, revenue rulings, and procedures would be included.
FYI, each year the IRS publishes a list of its top priority projects for the upcoming calendar year. We follow this annually with interest to see what changes may be in the offing. The IRS 2017 “wish list” was published in October of last year and can be found at https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/2016-2017_pgp_1st_quarter_update.pdf. To put things in perspective, this listing of high-priority regulations – for one year – is 33 pages in length. Consider… this is but only one government agency. Parenthetically, while IRS has designs on a plethora of new pension/401(k) and §409A and §457(f) deferred compensation regs, the list is noticeably absent of new ACA tax-related items, such as nondiscrimination regs for insured health plans.
Unquestionably, this order will have a resounding effect on the frequency of new federal regulation impacting employee benefits.
Read the official executive order now!
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