GAO: Compliance Costs of ObamaCare's 1099 Reporting Requirement Are Low

At yesterday's hearing of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship on Assessing the Regulatory and Administrative Burdens on America’s Small Businesses, James R. White, Director of Tax Issues at the Government Accountability Office, testified on Small Businesses: Tax Compliance Benefits and Opportunities to Mitigate Costs on Third Parties of Miscellaneous Income Reporting Requirements (GAO-11-218T):

Information reporting is a powerful tool for encouraging voluntary compliance by payees and helping IRS detect underreported income. Also, information reporting may sometimes reduce taxpayers’ costs of preparing their tax returns, although by how much is not known. IRS estimated that $68 billion of the annual $345 billion gross tax gap for 2001, the most current available estimate, was caused by sole proprietors underreporting their net business income. A key reason for this noncompliance was that sole proprietors were not subject to tax withholding and only a portion of their net business income was reported to IRS by third parties. The benefits from information reporting are affected by payers’ compliance with reporting requirements and IRS’s ability to use the information in its process that matches third-party data with tax returns. ...

 
This testimony summarizes recent GAO reports and provides information on (1) benefits of the current requirements in terms of improved compliance by taxpayers and reduced taxpayer recordkeeping, (2) costs to the third-party businesses of the current 1099-MISC reporting requirement, and (3) options for mitigating the reporting burden for third-party businesses. GAO has not assessed the expansion of 1099-MISC reporting to payments for goods.

Current 1099-MISC requirements impose costs on the third parties required to file them. The magnitude of these costs is not easily estimated because payers generally do not track these costs separate from other accounting costs. In nongeneralizable case studies conducted in 2007 with four payers and five vendors that file information returns on behalf of their clients, GAO was told that existing information return costs were relatively low. One small business employing under five people told GAO of possibly spending 3 to 5 hours per year filing Form 1099 information returns manually, using an accounting package to gather the information. Two vendors reported prices for preparing and filing Forms 1099 of about $10 per form for 5 forms to about $2 per form for 100 forms, with one charging about $0.80 per form for 100,000 forms.

At yesterday's hearing, Winslow Sargeant, Chief Counsel for Advocacy U.S. Small Business Administration, testified on the regulatory and administrative burdens on small businesses and endorsed the repeal of the ObamaCare's 1099 reporting obligation: