Rollbacks of Tax Rules to Take Back Seat to Guidance for New Law

Ambitious Treasury Department and IRS plans to roll back tax regulations that business doesn’t like could stall as the agencies tackle rules implementing the huge GOP tax law and deal with government-shutdown hiccups.

Rules on corporate subsidiaries’ foreign-currency gains and losses, the stock-buyback excise tax, and cloud computing are among those that Treasury and the IRS may seek to roll back or revise next as part of their deregulatory efforts.

That would follow the withdrawal or overhaul in recent months of rules on partnerships, the corporate book-income tax, and “double-dipping” of corporate losses, among others.

But the agencies are also ...