AHCIA Provisions Absent from Year-End Tax Bill

The fiscal year (FY) 2020 appropriations bills recently passed through Congress and was signed by President Trump before the Dec. 20 deadline, averting a government shutdown like the one experienced with the FY 2019 spending bills. The FY 2020 measures include appropriations for Transportation-HUD, as well as the tax extenders.

Unfortunately, for the LIHTC industry, the tax package attached to the spending legislation didn’t ultimately include housing credit provisions from the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act (AHCIA). It had been reported that the 4 percent minimum housing credit rate for bond-financed properties had made it into the tax package. But at the last minute, objections were raised about the overall size of the package. As a result, this and other provisions were stripped from the bill’s final version.

Separate from the AHCIA provisions, the tax bill does include increased LIHTC authority in California for developments in qualified presidentially declared disaster areas for wildfires in 2017 and 2018, up to an amount equal to 50 percent of the state’s LIHTC authority from those years.