In the run up to tax filing season, which begins on Jan. 28, the IRS has released regulations and other guidance on key provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). One is IRS Code Section 199A, which provides for a 20 percent deduction for pass-through organizations with qualified business income (QBI), and another is Section 965, which governs taxes on repatriated income.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that a state government can require retailers to collect sales tax even if they have no physical presence in the state overturns decades of precedent and exposes online merchants to a complex web of compliance decisions. 

A new Form W-4, Employee’s Withholding Allowance Certificate, proposed by the IRS in June, asks for potentially sensitive personal financial information, leading some preparers to view it as a needlessly complicated violation of taxpayer privacy.

A proposed change to the Form 1040, designed to make filing taxes easier, might paradoxically complicate the process for certain taxpayers. Released in late June, the new form is physically smaller than the current one, as the Treasury Department said it is meant to be the size of a postcard. But in order to fit onto the postcard-sized space, more than half of the 78 line items on the current Form 1040 would be moved to six separate schedules that would need to be attached to the new form.

The Trump administration is challenging a tax benefit available to companies that import and export wine, but not those dealing in beer and hard liquor. The benefit, amounting to $50 million a year, arose from a 2004 decision by a Customs and Boarder Patrol office in San Francisco.

The IRS has started to enforce a 2015 law requiring it to coordinate with the State Department to deny or revoke passports for taxpayers with more than $51,000 of overdue tax debt. The IRS reports that there are more than 362,000 Americans who will be denied new or renewed passports if they don’t pay off these debts.