Legislate in haste, repent at leisure.
The GOP tax law written and passed at near-record speed in December is packed with miscues, errors and typos that will confuse accountants and tax preparers and could cost the government big bucks, taxation experts say.
One glitch prevents restaurants, retailers and even real-estate companies like President Trump’s from deducting the costs of renovations over the short term, as Congress meant.
Instead, what looks like a typo could force the businesses to spread out the costs over 39 years.
Another snafu opens new loopholes for Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms.
They’ll have an easier time avoiding rules that were meant to increase the taxes they pay on so-called “carried interest,” a favorite issue of Trump’s on the campaign trail.
The bill also contains a confusing bit of language about the date when businesses can use losses to reduce their taxes.
Congress will have a hard time fixing up the mess, said David Kamin, a law professor at NYU and tax expert.
“Some things are easy fixes,” Kamin said. “Other elements are much harder to fix without undoing the basic structure of the law.”
GOP legislators hope to tackle the problem quickly. House Speaker Paul Ryan (above) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell want to get to work on fixing the glitches next month.
But Democrats aren’t rushing to cooperate.
“We’re not going to say to Republicans, ‘Oh tell us what you want to do,’ ” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) told Politico.
“We want to make the bill better, not just correct whatever technical fix is needed,” said Brown, who sits on the tax-writing Senate Finance committee.
Most of the major issues to come up in the law apply to businesses, said Kamin, who was among the authors of a report on the bill’s problems.
But business and individual taxes aren’t totally distinct, Kamin told The Post. “Dramatic business reforms have dramatic effects on the individual income tax,” he said.
For instance, he noted, some high-earning professionals with good tax advisers could take advantage of provisions in the new law to set themselves up as corporations.
That could make them eligible to pay the 21 percent corporate rate on their income, instead of individual tax rates that are as high as 37 percent.
There are also glitches in the way that Congress went about eliminating the state and local tax deduction — which could affect New York, New Jersey and Connecticut taxpayers.
States, cities and other localities may be able to avoid the issue by changing their tax laws, Kamin said But that will cost the feds cash meant to offset other cuts.
Meanwhile, the new law is proving a boon for corporations and their shareholders.
Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett said Saturday that the new law gave a $29 billion windfall to the conglomerate that amounts to nearly 45 percent of its total $65.3 billion profit for 2017.