Longtime tax aide leaving Senate Finance Committee

A longtime aide for Senate Finance Committee Republicans is departing the panel’s staff following passage of the Republican tax law, committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) announced Tuesday.

Mark Prater, deputy staff director and chief tax counsel for the committee, will be leaving after almost three decades. The Finance Committee did not provide information about Prater’s future plans.

{mosads}“Mark has played a vital role in every major tax debate in the last quarter century,” Hatch said in a news release. “This experience, coupled with his encyclopedic knowledge of the tax code, has proved instrumental not only to the committee, but also to the conference as a whole as we ushered the passage of the largest tax rewrite in more than 30 years through Congress — we couldn’t have done it without him.”

Prater is the latest GOP tax staffer to leave Congress in the months after President Trump signed the new tax law.

Akin Gump has hired former tax aides for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). The former staff director for the House Ways and Means Committee joined Squire Patton Boggs. And Capitol Tax Partners announced Tuesday that it hired a former tax and budget aide to Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.).

Along with announcing Prater’s departure, Hatch also announced other staffing changes for the Finance Committee. Hatch said that Jeff Wrase, chief economist for the Finance Committee, will become the committee’s deputy staff director, and Jennifer Acuña, the panel’s senior tax counsel and policy advisor, will become chief tax counsel.