The U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted to repeal a tax-reporting requirement contained in last year’s healthcare law that was widely criticized for being too burdensome, the first significant change to the law and one of the few bipartisan acts of Congress so far this year.

The 87-12 vote sends the measure to U.S. President Barack Obama for his signature. The tax-reporting measure would have required businesses to file 1099 forms with the Internal Revenue Service showing payments of $600 or more to vendors. The goal was to reduce tax evasion, but businesses said it would have added to the time and cost of tax preparation.

Republicans and Democrats had agreed that repealing the tax-reporting requirement was a good idea, but had differed over how to compensate for it. The approved repeal would make up for taxes lost to vendor evasion by requiring low- and middle-income Americans who receive a tax credit for buying their own health insurance to repay the credit if their income winds up being too high. The repayment obligation would show up as a tax charge during the tax filing season.

“How would most middle-class families deal with a tax bill of $10,000 or more just because their income may have increased $1 above the elgibility limits during the year they got accepted?” said Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), who tried and failed to repeal the mechanism for dealing with the cost of the repeal.

The National Taxpayers Union, a group that focuses on cutting taxes, has estimated that the repeal would cost $19.7 billion. The group estimated that the losses would be offset by taking back $19.9 billion in overpayments.

(Source: WSJ)