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While it would be unconstitutional in the United States, keep in mind that in certain countries "ex post facto" making certain tax avoidance schemes retroactively unlawful is not unheard of, e.g. BN66 in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN66

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The IRS sometimes does that. They'll decide in 2008 that some accounting rule is invalid, and oh by the way, that means you owe taxes back to 2002 when you started using it. They can't reverse a rule, but apparently rules can be clarified at any time, so if your loophole hasn't been affirmatively decided, it may retroactively disappear.

Could this happen to the backdoor Roth? I know they've clarified the "mega" backdoor Roth, making it perfectly valid, but AFAIK there hasn't been word on the backdoor Roth.

I think that's a legislative issue, so probably not.

I'm thinking of cases like tax credits for R&D, where a company claims the lab janitors salary because the lab isn't going to clean itself, but the IRS decides that salary doesn't count as a research cost. The law from congress doesn't usually spell such things out. Or it says "necessary personnel" but is a janitor necessary or not?

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