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Federal Register / Vol. 86, No. 8 / Wednesday, January 13, 2021 / Proposed Rules
addition to or concurrent with, as the case may be any period specified by the Secretary under section 7508Aa or b with respect to such person.
Because section 7508Aa does not, on its own, operate to postpone any acts, the Secretary must determine which acts to postpone. As a result, the requirement in section 7508Ad1 that the mandatory 60-day postponement period be disregarded in the same manner as a period specified under section 7508Aa indicates that the acts covered by the mandatory 60-day postponement period under section 7508Ad1 must also be determined by the Secretary in the manner required under section 7508Aa.
Under section 7508Ad5, the mandatory 60-day postponement period in section 7508Ad runs concurrently with the postponement period determined by the Secretary under section 7508Aa if the period determined by the Secretary under section 7508Aa is equal to or longer than 60 days. If the Secretarys postponement period under section 7508Aa is less than 60 days, the mandatory 60-day postponement period would run concurrently for the length of the Secretarys postponement period under section 7508Aa and then continue running in addition to the Secretarys postponement period. The mandatory 60-day postponement period generally begins on the earliest incident date specified in a FEMA disaster declaration and ends on the date which is 60 days after the latest incident date.
IV. Legislative History of Section 7508Ad The legislative history of section 7508Ad of the Code is sparse. There are no House, Senate, or Conference Reports concerning the FCAA. The identical text of section 7508Ad was included in the same session of Congress in H.R. 3301, which was not enacted. Before H.R. 3301 was set to be marked up by the House Ways and Means Committee on June 30, 2019, the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation prepared a partial description of proposed section 7508Ad in JCX 3019
June 18, 2019 Joint Committee Report.
The Joint Committee Report at 8687
described twelve categories of timesensitive acts that could be postponed which are performed by taxpayers for example, filing any return or paying any tax or by the IRS for example, assessment or collection of any tax, which are the same eleven items described in section 7508a1AK
for taxpayers serving in a combat zone, plus the set of acts regarding pensions
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that are described in 301.7508A
1c1iii. The Joint Committee Report did not discuss why section 7508Ad only refers to the acts regarding pensions in section 7508Ad4 to be postponed, but not the eleven categories of acts described in section 7508a1AK. The Joint Committee Report also did not discuss the intended meaning of section 7508Ad1s provision that periods of time shall be disregarded in the same manner as under section 7508Aa.
As regards the proposed length of the mandatory 60-day postponement period, the Joint Committee at 87
stated only that the 60-day period begins on the earliest incident date specified in the declaration of the relevant disaster and ends on the date which is 60 days after the latest incident date so specified. The Joint Committee Report did not refer to or explain how the new proposed section 7508Ad might be applied in the event that a declaration did not specify an incident date, or in the event of a prolonged and uncertain disaster period, such as in the case of a drought or pandemic.
On January 21, 2020, a month after the enactment of section 7508Ad, the House Ways and Means Committee released a report on H.R. 3301, H. Rept.
No. 116379 2020 House Committee Report, which largely repeated at 97
100 the explanations previously provided by the Joint Committee Report regarding the features of section 7508Ad. In this report, the Ways and Means Committee titled the section discussing the text of what had been enacted as section 7508Ad, Automatic Extension of Filing Deadlines in Case of Certain Taxpayers Affected by Federally Declared Disasters. H.R. Rep. No. 116379, at 97
2020. Next, the House Committee Report described the current law prior to enactment of section 7508Ad, beginning with a discussion of the filing deadlines for Federal income tax returns and quarterly estimated tax payments, and ending with a listing of all of the items in section 7508a1 and section 7508Aa that the Secretary may postpone in the event of a Federally declared disaster. Id. at 9798. Then, the report identified the reason for change as follows:
The Committee believes that the certainty and additional time provided by an automatic extension of filing deadlines for taxpayers affected by Federally declared disasters will ease the burden of tax compliance for taxpayers dealing with the hardship of disaster recovery.

Id. at 99. Again, the House Committee Report only identified an automatic extension of filing deadlines as the
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purpose for the new statutory text.
However, in the Explanation of Provision section that followed, the House Committee Report seems to indicate that the statute was meant to postpone all of the deadlines that it had listed in its description of current law:
The provision provides to qualified taxpayers in the case of a Federally declared disaster a mandatory 60-day period that is disregarded in determining whether the acts listed above were performed in the time prescribed; the amount of interest, penalty, additional amount, or addition to tax; and the amount of credit or refund. The 60-day period begins on the earliest incident date specified in the declaration of the relevant disaster and ends on the date which is 60
days after the latest incident date so specified.

Id. at 99. The Explanation of Provision section of the House Committee Report is inconsistent with the reports Reason for Change section, and neither section comports with the statutory text of section 7508Ad as enacted, because the statutory text does not reference which specified acts let alone all are postponed under section 7508Aa.
Explanation of Provisions The Treasury Department and the IRS
have determined it necessary to propose regulations addressing the enactment of section 7508Ad because the statutory text is ambiguous in at least two respects. First, it is unclear what timesensitive acts are to be postponed.
Second, it is unclear how the mandatory 60-day postponement period is to be calculated when the declaration specified in section 7508Ad does not contain an incident date. Further, the legislative history described in the Background section is insufficient to explain these areas of ambiguity. The Treasury Department and the IRS have also determined it necessary to propose regulations addressing the ambiguity between the different terms used in the Code and in the Stafford Act to refer to disasters determined by the President to warrant Federal assistance. This Explanation of Provisions section discusses the proposed regulations addressing each of these areas of ambiguity.
I. Time-Sensitive Tax Acts Section 7508Ad provides a mandatory 60-day period during which qualified taxpayers will receive disaster relief. Except for the rules regarding pensions described in section 7508Ad4, section 7508Ad does not specify the time-sensitive tax acts to be postponed during the mandatory 60-day postponement period. Section
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