Senate Republicans are working to change a House GOP tax plan to require fewer cuts in Medicaid health benefits for the poor and disabled, seeking to mollify members of the party worried about a public backlash.

The move, which is not finalized, also pares back requirements for other spending cuts but risks alienating deficit hawks in both the Senate and the House. Fiscal conservatives in the party want steep spending cuts to help offset the multitrillion-dollar tax-cut package. 

Still, the Senate budget plan being prepared allows the party to side-step for now a potential political uproar and eliminates one of several obstacles to delivering President Donald Trump’s tax cut plan.

Republicans are using a two-step process to enact at least $4.5 trillion in tax cuts without the help of Democrats. To do that, the Senate and House need to agree to a budget plan that outlines the size of both the tax cuts and spending reductions.

The tax cut package includes an extension of Trump’s 2017 cuts for individuals and privately held businesses. Republicans are also aiming to pass additional tax reductions, but narrow majorities in each chamber mean they need to be largely unified on every element of the bill.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham told reporters on Thursday that he is not planning to dictate explicit spending cuts in the budget resolution he is writing. That is in contrast to the House-passed version, which instructed the committee in charge of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program to cut $880 billion over a decade.

The Senate budget plan could include relatively small levels of minimum cuts — such as $1 billion to each committee involved with the bill, according to a person familiar with the plan, who requested anonymity to discuss the evolving negotiations. That would put off any hard decisions on reductions to Medicaid and other programs like food stamps.

Senator John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican involved in talks on the budget plan, said the approach offers senate committees “flexibility” on spending cuts.

The change could win the votes of Republican senators representing states with high Medicaid usage who have expressed concern about the House tax blueprint, including Josh Hawley of Missouri and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. 

West Virginia Republican Senator Jim Justice said this week he does not want to see Medicaid benefits cut, although he is open to rooting out fraud and imposing work requirements. 

“A whole lot of people are on Medicaid,” in his state, he said, predicting Congress wouldn’t slash their benefits.

Senator Shelley Moore Capito, also a West Virginia Republican, said she is “concerned” about the House budget and the Medicaid cut target is “awfully large.”

In West Virginia, 30% of the state’s residents under 65 years old and 45% of children were covered by Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in 2023, the fifth highest share of any U.S. state, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Republicans need 50 of the 53 GOP senators in the chamber to pass the budget. Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky already announced he won’t support the measure because it includes an increase in the nation’s debt limit.

Dialing back the calls for spending cuts could mean other members pull their support.

Senator John Cornyn told reporters he wants more explicit targets in the budget to ensure large spending cuts. 

“This may be the last time in our careers we have the chance,” to make such budget savings, he said.

Nothing but the tooth; an offer she can’t refuse; patterns of filing; and other highlights of recent tax cases.

Fort Collins, Colorado: Dr. Ryan Ulibarri, a dentist, has pleaded guilty to six counts of tax evasion related to his use of an illegal tax shelter.

Since 2014 Ulibarri owned and operated Ulibarri Family Dentistry. In 2016, he purchased an abusive-trust tax shelter for $50,000. The shelter concealed income and created phony deductions through a so-called business trust, family trust, charitable trust and a private family foundation, all of which Ulibarri created and controlled. From 2017 through 2022, he used this shelter to conceal from the IRS more than $3.5 million in income from his dental practice.

As the purported trustee, Ulibarri signed trust instruments purporting to create the three trusts and the foundation, and opened bank accounts in the name of each. He recruited friends to falsely sign his trust instruments as the purported creators. Ulibarri transferred majority ownership of his practice to the business trust despite having been warned by attorneys and CPAs that in Colorado a trust could not own a dental practice.

He then transferred more than $3 million from his practice to create the illusion that the funds belonged to those entities. Ulibarri retained complete control over the funds and used them to pay for personal expenses including his home mortgage, credit card bills, boats and professional baseball season tickets.

He filed false returns for himself, his dental practice and the trusts and foundation that falsely reported the income he earned from his practice as income of the trusts. Ulibarri also claimed fraudulent deductions for his personal living expenses, which he disguised as trust expenses and charitable donations.

Ulibarri is alleged to have caused a total tax loss to the IRS exceeding $1 million.

Sentencing is June 17. He faces up to five years in prison for each count of tax evasion, as well as a period of supervised release, restitution and monetary penalties. 

Kingsport, Tennessee: Resident Aylissa Glidewell has pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit wire and mail fraud after making claims for refunds of false pandemic tax credits.

She conspired to file false returns seeking fraudulent refunds based on the Employee Retention Credit and paid sick and family leave credit by creating phony businesses. She filed numerous false returns for those businesses and directed the refunds to addresses that she and conspirators controlled.

In total, the refunds claimed exceeded $3.4 million, of which the IRS paid some $1.8 million.

Sentencing is July 9. She faces a maximum of 20 years in prison.

Irvine, California: Iris Ramaya Au, former girlfriend of cryptocurrency fraudster Adam Iza, who dubbed himself “The Godfather,” has agreed to plead guilty to a federal tax charge for failing to report more than $2.6 million she’d obtained via her then-boyfriend’s criminal activity.

From 2020 to 2024, Iza obtained millions of dollars of unreported income from a series of crimes, including fraudulently obtaining access to advertising accounts and lines of credit provided by Facebook and Meta Platforms and selling access to those accounts. He also engaged active Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies to provide private security for him and caused the deputies, among other things, to obtain court-authorized search warrants and confidential law enforcement information targeting people with whom he had financial and personal disputes.

On Jan. 30, Iza pleaded guilty; his sentencing is June 16, when he will face up to 35 years in prison. He has been in federal custody since September.

Au created shell corporations and opened bank accounts in the names of those entities. She then used the illicit funds in those accounts to pay some $1 million to the deputies, mostly in cash, purchase or lease luxury real estate, cars, jewelry and clothing, pay for recreational activity for Iza and herself valued at nearly $10 million and to acquire some $16 million in cryptocurrency for Iza.

Au admitted that she transferred more than $2.6 million from these accounts to her personal bank accounts from 2020 through 2023, income that she failed to report to the IRS on her federal returns.

After pleading guilty, Au will face up to three years in prison.

Orlando, Florida: Marielys Feliciano Rodriguez has been sentenced to a year of house arrest and ordered to pay $3,338,558 in restitution to the IRS for wire and tax fraud. 

Rodriguez established a shell company that purported to be involved in the construction industry. She obtained a workers’ compensation insurance policy in the name of the company to cover a minimal payroll for a few purported employees, then “rented” the insurance to work crews who had obtained subcontracts with construction contractors on projects in Florida counties, as well as to contractors in other states. Rodriguez sent the contractors a certificate as “proof” that the work crews had workers’ comp. The scheme also facilitated avoidance of the higher cost of adequate workers’ comp for the workers on the crews to whom Rodriguez rented insurance.

The contractors issued payroll checks for the workers’ wages to the shell companies and Rodriguez cashed these checks and then distributed the cash to the work crews after deducting their fee, which was typically about 6% of the payroll. Rodriguez cashed payroll checks totaling some $13 million.

Neither the shell company nor the contractors reported to government authorities the wages that were paid to the workers, nor did they pay either the employees’ or the employer’s portion of payroll taxes, totaling more than $3 million.

She was ordered to serve five years of supervised release as well, and the court also entered a money judgment for $347,760, the proceeds of the wire fraud.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Tax preparer Whylithia R. Robinson has been held in contempt for violating a permanent injunction that prohibited her and her business, AAA Tax Service LLC, from preparing, filing or assisting in the preparation or filing of federal returns for others.

The U.S. filed a complaint against Robinson and AAA in January 2023. According to the complaint, Robinson prepared and filed 2,629 federal income tax returns for clients through AAA from 2019 to 2021 and displayed a pattern of filing returns during this period that understated clients’ tax liabilities and overstated refunds by fabricating business losses, claiming false charitable donations or claiming undeserved education credits. On April 23, 2023, the court issued a default judgment of permanent injunction that barred Robinson and AAA from preparing returns for others.

The court recently found that she continued to prepare 227 returns for others. For these violations, the court held her in civil contempt and ordered that she disgorge $68,100 in fees she’d earned in violation of the injunction, as well as reimburse the U.S. its costs of litigation and travel.

Hurricane, West Virginia: Businessman Dean E. Dawson, 65, has pleaded guilty to one count of willful failure to pay over employment taxes.

He operated RPC Group, a real estate appraisal business. Dawson, responsible for withholding employment taxes from employees and paying over those funds to the IRS, failed to pay the money over between 2015 and 2022. He also used the RPC business accounts to pay personal expenses, including credit cards and his wife’s home mortgage, and issued checks to his wife from RPC even though she was not an employee.

From 2018 to 2023, Dawson also failed to file personal returns or pay income tax.

In total, he caused a tax loss to the IRS exceeding $250,000.

Sentencing is June 23. He faces up to five years in prison, up to three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine, as well as restitution to be determined later.

The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board released a first-time implementation guide Thursday for the International Standard on Auditing for Audits of Financial Statements of Less Complex Entities, while a different global standard-setter introduced an online tool for adopting sustainability standards.

The standard, also known as ISA for LCE, is designed specifically for audits of financial statements of smaller and less complex entities. The IAASB unveiled the standard in December 2023 and then released an adoption guide last September. 

The new implementation guide complements the adoption guide and includes an overview of the standard’s concepts, structure and format. It also features step-by-step insights into each part of the standard, with examples and comparisons to ISAs, equipping practitioners with the tools to effectively implement the ISA for LCE. 

The IAASB has posted other resources as well, such as supplementary guidance on the authority of the standard and on auditor reporting, videos and webinars at www.iaasb.org/ISAforLCE.

ISSB Roadmap Tool

Separately on the international financial standard-setting front, the International Sustainability Standard Board and its parent organization, the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, released a Jurisdictional Roadmap Development Tool for adopting ISSB standards.

The interactive tool develops the concepts set out in the Inaugural Jurisdictional Guide for the adoption or other use of ISSB standards into a practical application, to support jurisdictions and implementation partners as they navigate the policy considerations and key steps of planning and designing their roadmap for the adoption or other use of ISSB standards.

“As part of its objective to support effective and efficient capital markets, the ISSB is helping jurisdictions in the development of their adoption roadmaps,” said ISSB chair Emmanuel Faber in a statement Thursday. “The launch of the Roadmap Tool marks a significant milestone and confirms the ISSB’s commitment to developing tools and resources that are useful to jurisdictions. This Roadmap Tool equips regulators to make informed decisions about their approach towards adoption or other use of ISSB standards.”

By using the Roadmap Tool, jurisdictions will be able to make informed decisions on the regulatory process for how to adopt or otherwise use ISSB standards, reporting entities that will be subject to the requirements, the specific content covered in the sustainability-related disclosure requirements, addressing when requirements will become effective, setting a suitable timeline and whether there is a case for scaling and phasing in.

Along with the Roadmap Tool, the IFRS Foundation has also made available templates of the jurisdictional approaches described in the Inaugural Jurisdictional Guide. The templates provide jurisdictions and implementation partners with a reference to understand how a jurisdiction’s decisions — and the corresponding outcomes — can be understood by stakeholders and described by the IFRS Foundation.