U.S. Senate approves tax reform bill with amendments

On December 2, the Senate voted 51 to 49 to pass an amended version of the tax reform bill previously reported by the Senate Finance Committee. The Senate adopted several significant changes to the Finance Committee bill in order to secure sufficient votes to pass the legislation.

Although similar in overall structure, the amended Senate tax reform bill differs in key details from the ‘Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’ (HR 1) approved on November 16 by the House of Representatives.

A House and Senate conference committee is expected to begin work this week on resolving the differences in the two versions of tax reform legislation. Once the conference committee has reached an agreement, both the House and Senate must vote to pass a final bill in identical form before tax reform legislation can be signed into law by President Trump. Congressional Republican leaders are hopeful that the ‘Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’ will be enacted before the end of December 2017.For further details on the amended Senate tax reform bill, please see the attached Tax Insights from PwC’s Washington National Tax Services.