WASHINGTON-- The National Retail Federation (NRF) welcomed a U.S. House of Representatives vote to repeal a provision in the health care reform law that would widely expand the number of IRS 1099 tax forms businesses would be required to file.
"This is a commonsense step to keep the business community from being hit with a blizzard of unnecessary paperwork that has nothing to do with health care," NRF senior vice president for government relations David French said. "The important thing now is for the House and Senate to come together on a final version of repeal and [image-nocss] settle this issue as quickly as possible. This provision never should have been in the health care bill to begin with, and it's already taken far too long to get it removed."
The House voted 314 to 112 yesterday to approve H.R. 4, the Small Business Paperwork Mandate Elimination Act, sponsored by Representative Dan Lungren (R-Calif.). The bill would repeal a provision in the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act of 2010 that requires businesses to file a Form 1099 with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whenever they make noncredit-card payments totaling $600 or more to a vendor during a single year.
Federal law has long required a Form 1099 when a business pays $600 a year or more to an individual or unincorporated business for services, but the new provision extends the requirement to include payments to corporations and to include purchases of tangible goods in addition to services. The broadened requirement is set to go into effect in 2012 and is expected to bring in $19 billion in tax revenue to help fund health care reform.
A similar repeal measure was approved by the Senate as part of an unrelated Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill passed on February 17, but the two versions differ on how to make up for the loss of the revenue the provision would raise.
Seth Shipley, owner of Shipley's Diamonds and Fine Jewelry in Hampstead, Md., testified on behalf of NRF before the House Small Business Committee last month that tracking hundreds of vendors in order to comply with the provision would require an additional 1,000 hours of work each year and cost him $35,000.
As the world's largest retail trade association and the voice of retail worldwide, NRF's global membership includes retailers of all sizes, formats and channels of distribution as well as chain restaurants and industry partners from the United States and more than 45 countries abroad. In the United States, NRF represents the breadth and diversity of an industry with more than 1.6 million American companies that employ nearly 25 million workers and generated 2010 sales of $2.4 trillion.
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