On the recordDecember 16, 2014
today, I am introducing the Partnership Auditing Fairness Act, a bill designed to improve and streamline the audit procedures for large partnerships. This bill would ensure that large for-profit partnerships, like other large profitable businesses, are subject to routine audits by the Internal Revenue Service, IRS, and eliminate audit red tape that currently impedes IRS oversight. This legislation mirrors a provision in the Tax Reform Act of 2014, introduced earlier this year by Congressman David Camp. This legislation would fix a problem that has gained only more urgency with time and the explosion in growth of large partnerships, including hedge funds, private equity funds, and publicly traded partnerships. In a September 2014 report, the Government Accountability Office, GAO, determined that the number of large partnerships, defined by GAO as those with at least 100 partners and $100 million in assets, has tripled since 2002, to over 10,000, while the number of so-called C corporations being created, which include our largest public companies, fell by 22 percent. According to the GAO report, some of those partnerships have revenues totaling billions of dollars per year and now collectively hold more than $7.5 trillion in assets, but the IRS is auditing only a tiny fraction of them. According to GAO, in 2012, the IRS audited less than 1 percent of large partnerships compared to 27 percent of C corporations.…





