Partnership Centralized Audit Rules Enacted in 2015 Having a General Start Date For Taxable Years Beginning January 1, 2018 The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 (the “Budget Act”) which the President signed into law on November 2, 2015 (as modified by the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes Act of 2015 (the “PATH Act”), fundamentally changes how the Service will conduct audits of partnerships. The Budget Act repeals the partnership audit provisions of the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (“TEFRA”) and electing large partnership regimes and replaces them with a new set of rules for partnership audits and judicial review of partnership audit adjustments under a centralized or consolidated partnership audit regime. While the new rules may have had a specific purpose in mind, i.e., of streamlining partnership audits and raising revenues from incorrect tax positions taken by large partnerships, the statutory language and principles in the new legislation suffer from several structural defects, some of which are fundamentally inconsistent with the long-standing principles of partnership taxation under Subchapter K.
