WASHINGTON BUREAU — Senate Majority Harry Reid and Sen. Max Baucus have introduced a bill that would strike expanded Form 1099 tax reporting requirements from the Affordable Care Act.
Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Reid, D-Nev., have pledged to pass the bill "with strong bipartisan support."
A 1099 reporting expansion repeal bill, H.R. 4, was introduced in the House last week.
Baucus also introduced an earlier 1099 fix bill in November 2010, during the 111th Congress.
Section 9006 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), a component of the Affordable Care Act package, will require all business entities to file a 1099 report with the Internal Revenue Service for each vendor with whom they have total transactions of $600 or more in a given tax year. The provision was inserted as a means of raising $19 billion over 10 years.
Reid and Baucus are defending the original move to put the provision in PPACA.
"This expansion of the 1099 reporting requirements was proposed by the Bush administration
to help better keep track of what businesses spend and earn, which in turn helps better keep track of tax liability," Reid and Baucus say in a statement.
The U.S. Treasury Department estimates that more than $345 billion in owed taxes go unpaid each year, the lawmakers say.
Baucus says that, as chairman of the Finance Committee, he "worked together 
with the Bush administration to begin crafting the policy, which was designed to collect more of those unpaid taxes and help keep taxes lower for all taxpayers."
After the provision became law, "more businesses owners became aware of the new paperwork requirements and raised concerns about the resources that would be required to complete the forms when they would need to begin doing so in January 2012," Baucus says.
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