One of the dumbest…


Inkwell was about to say “one of the dumbest provisions in the recent health care legislation,” but she stopped when she thought a few seconds about the competition.


 There are so many dumb provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.


But a really dumb one requires businesses to report to the IRS any transaction of $600 or more. A big batch of office supplies? The IRS must know. It has been reported that even the White House would like to see this vanish. But yesterday, the Senate voted down two different amendments aimed at fixing the problem.


The DC Examiner reports:



Partisanship is already dominating the final work week in the Senate. While both Republicans and Democrats agree that a new tax reporting requirement in the health care law should be scaled back, each party defeated the other side’s proposal to accomplish that goal.



Senators just voted 46-52 against an amendment by Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb. that would have stripped out the provision, which requires businesses to report to the IRS transactions to anyone or any company that cost more than $600.



The Senate then defeated a similar amendment by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. Nelson’s measure, which went down in a 61-37 vote, would have raised the reporting requirement to $5,000 and excluded businesses with fewer than 25 employees….



Unless the two parties can agree on a compromise, the tax reporting requirement that nobody seems to like is going to remain in the bill. The reporting requirements are set to begin in 2012.


This is the sort of thing that might not have made it into the bill at all if there had not been so much haste occasioned by the need to pass the bill before it was read.