Employers may not have to adjust their qualified transportation fringe benefit programs after all — at least not just yet. A legislative provision that would have affected QTFBs by boosting the mass transit exclusion to the same level as that for qualified parking — the so-called “mass transit parity” provision — did not make it into the version of the bill now being considered on Capitol Hill.
The larger bill is known as the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, or MAP-21, and provides major transportation infrastructure funding for the nation. Congress has been hammering out a two-year federal highway funding law — which might have included a provision to equalize the monthly dollar limit for all types of transportation fringe benefits under Code Section 132 — under the MAP-21 moniker. Legislators were trying to beat the June 30 deadline by which temporary highway funding would run out.
Lawmakers have been known to insert unrelated pieces of legislation into major bills like MAP-21, in essence pinning a smaller proposal to the coattails of a larger one. The transit parity provision had been in S. 1813, the Senate version while the House debated H.R. 4348, its own version.
House lawmakers agreed to H.R. 4348 — which does not have a transit parity provision in it — on June 29, and began the process of reconciling their marked-up version with S. 1813. The merged bill, laid out in a conference report, did not have the transit parity provision — Section 40204 of the Senate bill — as of July 2. That is not to say that the provision could not be added back in, but a member of Congress would have to take action to re-insert the language into the agreement.