Pandemic Darlings The pandemic economy, in original documents
Home Profiles Jason Smith

Profiles · Officials · Congress

ProfilePerson

Jason Smith

Official · Congress

ERC
Type
Person
Role
Official · Congress
Programs
ERC
Updated

The profile

The Missouri Republican who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee. He sponsored the January 2024 Employee Retention Credit cutoff that passed the House 357 to 70 and died in the Senate, then carried the cutoff into the July 2025 law that ended late claims.

Identity and role

Jason Smith represents Missouri's 8th District in the U.S. House and chairs the Committee on Ways and Means, the House's tax-writing committee; the committee's releases call him chairman from 2023 through September 2026. He is the sponsor of H.R. 7024, the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024.

Pandemic-relief role

Smith's Employee Retention Credit (ERC) record starts with a hearing. The Ways and Means oversight subcommittee held a hearing on July 27, 2023, "The Employee Retention Tax Credit Experience: Confusion, Delays, and Fraud." Smith said there that the IRS still had "almost half a million forms left to process" a day after Commissioner Daniel Werfel said the backlog of valid claims was cleared, and that "the lack of clarity and speed from the IRS created an environment where dishonest third-party companies took advantage of businesses."

On October 3, 2023, three weeks after the IRS stopped processing new claims, Smith and subcommittee chairman David Schweikert wrote to Werfel asking for the agency's fraud plan, its data behind the moratorium and its timeline for the backlog. The committee's release repeated a Wall Street Journal report of $220 billion in ERC payments "with another $120 billion lined up – six times higher than the original Congressional Budget Office estimate of $55 billion." Those are the committee's figures, citing a newspaper.

H.R. 7024: the 2024 cutoff

Smith introduced H.R. 7024 on January 17, 2024. It paired a larger child tax credit and business tax breaks with section 602, "Enforcement provisions with respect to COVID-related employee retention credits." That section barred any ERC credit or refund after January 31, 2024 unless the claim was filed by that date, and extended the assessment period to six years. It added due-diligence penalties of $1,000 per failure for "COVID-ERTC promoters," and raised the aiding-and-abetting penalty on promoters to the greater of $200,000 ($10,000 for an individual) or 75 percent of their gross income from the aid.

At the January 19 markup Smith said the bill "will save over $70 billion in taxpayer dollars by closing out the COVID-era Employee Retention Tax Credit Program, which has become overrun with fraud and ballooned in cost six times larger than CBO's original estimate." The committee approved it 40 to 3. The House passed it on January 31, 2024, the cutoff date in its own text, by 357 to 70. In the Senate, cloture on the motion to proceed failed 48 to 44 on August 1, 2024, and the bill went no further.

The 2025 law

In May 2025 Smith's substitute for the Ways and Means title of the reconciliation bill carried the ERC provisions again, as section 112205. The enacted law, Public Law 119-21, was signed July 4, 2025. It keeps the January 31, 2024 filing date but applies it to credits under section 3134 of the tax code, which the IRS describes as the third and fourth quarters of 2021: no such credit or refund may be allowed after enactment unless the claim was filed by January 31, 2024. It keeps the six-year assessment period and the $1,000 due-diligence penalty. The enacted section, 70605, does not include the $200,000-or-75-percent promoter penalty.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

The committee's website listed Smith as chairman in September 2026.

Sources

Back to top