The 11th meeting of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform will be held on Sept. 8 in Washington.
The meeting will be the second without testimony. Panel members are expected to continue discussing issues associated with reform and begin making concrete progress on what its final report to President Bush will include.
The bipartisan panel was established by President Bush in January and instructed to recommend reforms to the tax code by Sept. 30 in order to make the country's tax system simpler, fairer and oriented to economic growth. The panel, chaired by former Senator Connie Mack, was also instructed to keep any proposals revenue-neutral.
Jeffrey Kupfer, the panel's executive director, said he expects the group to make decisions on their report by consensus and will likely meet a second time later in the month to flesh out the specifics of what proposals and information will be in the final report. The September meetings will mark the first time the panel members have come together to voice their thoughts after considering months of testimony.Kupfer said many of the issues and ideas on the table remain similar to those discussed in 1986, when President Reagan's administration tackled an overhaul of the tax system. "A lot of the issues seem to be focused on international competitiveness -- about financial flows and the importance of investment growth," he said. "But on the whole, while the world has changed a lot in 20 years, many of the issues are the same."
