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— The United States House of Representatives passed a bill tonight that would put America's small business owners' personally identifiable information at unprecedented risk and cost them billions of dollars and millions of hours in paperwork. The Corporate Transparency Act of 2019 (H.R. 2513), which passed the House 249-173 attempts to shift a responsibility from big banks to America's smallest businesses, saddling them with an additional 131.7 million hours of paperwork at a cost of $5.7 billion over the first 10 years.
"The House today not only shouldered millions of small business owners with a tremendous compliance burden but put their personally identifiable information at serious risk," said NFIB President & CEO Juanita D. Duggan. "The reporting requirements and devastating financial penalties will affect only small businesses, from farmers to franchisees to the mom-and-pop retail shop down the street. It is a big-government solution in search of a small-business problem, and we will not cease our efforts to stand up for small businesses against this serious threat."
The Corporate Transparency Act of 2019 is legislation that would require only those small corporations and limited liability companies with 20 or fewer employees to complete and submit annual paperwork which includes the personally identifiable information of each business owner to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network upon the creation of the business and periodically for the life of the business. Failure to comply is a federal crime with civil penalties up to $10,000 and criminal penalties of up to three years in prison.
While everyone is distracted by "impeachment", this is what the government is doing.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/2513
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/proposed-corporate-transparency-act-2019-would-require-corporations-and-limited
(Score: 5, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Tuesday November 05 2019, @02:41PM (9 children)
The quoted nfib article seems beyond slanted frankly...like the stuff about putting their "personally identifiable information at unprecedented risk" for example. Based on the other links, they need to report this to the Treasury Department. Is that somehow riskier than when they file taxes with the IRS?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday November 05 2019, @03:47PM (6 children)
The point isn't actually the risk, it's the reporting. When I was still a US citizen, I had to file taxes with the IRS. But I also, as an expat, I also had to file paperwork with the treasury department. It's a completely different set of forms. It's much the same information, but in a different format, with different instructions, and you're a federal criminal if you screw it up. WHY???
Small businesses already register their owners with the government, they already file taxes. Why does the government need the same information, in yet a different format, sent to yet a different agency?
Repeat this at the state, county and local levels. The amount of reporting required increases continually. Somehow old reporting requirements never disappear, but new ones are added all the time. The amount of non-productive crap business owners deal with is completely nuts, all because some bureaucrat somewhere had a brainstorm.
From what I've read from small business owners in the US, the continually increasing requirements of the census bureau are a perfect example. You have to report all sorts of minority/discrimination/classification data on your employees. Of course, before you can report that data, you first have to collect and manage that data. Which, of course, every mom'n'pop business is just dying to do, because what else would small business owners do with their copious spare time.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @03:59PM (3 children)
Yes, exactly. And the idiots in this thread saying "it is only $19 per year" or whatever do not understand that $19 is coming from their paychecks one way or another.
Listen to Peter Schiffs podcasts where he discusses why he moved part of his business overseas just because of junk like this. The US gov is an active impediment to people hiring Americans.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday November 05 2019, @06:10PM (2 children)
Or, it's added to whatever tax software you use and automatically completed and submitted costing the average business roughly nothing. (That software should be provided for free by the government but that's socialism, and a whole other topic, for the record.)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 06 2019, @02:55AM
Why should things be so complicated that software needs to be provided? It's a deadend to make things that complicated when you can just not do it in the first place.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:14AM
Another huge problem with this assertion is that it goes to the US Treasury Department not the IRS. It's not tax related. Thus, it's not covered by tax software! So now, you have either some additional software that sends your information to the US Treasury Department. Or you have a massive information sharing uber program that sends all the appropriate information to the appropriate sources and never gets misappropriated by the usual suspects like US intelligence or Russian organized crime.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 05 2019, @04:12PM
Or the SBOs could just publish a webpage with the required information on it, one time - updated as required, and every agency in the country who needs it could scrape it from there. That would be real transparency.
If you were a Scandinavian, your annual income would be public record, much like property ownership is in the US, and, again, you could file your taxes as a transparent webpage. Shocking? Not really.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @08:14PM
Do they? How and where?
In fact, this has been an issue for quite some time [acfcs.org]:
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Tuesday November 05 2019, @06:33PM (1 child)
Taxes are legally protected from disclosure in most circumstances. I'm not sure FINCEN material is. Would a FOIA request produce PII?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @06:02AM
Such disclosures are under 5 USC § 552a(b) and are not allowed without the express written permission of the person in the record. There are exceptions to that rule, but they mostly apply to government, law enforcement, or litigation use. Based on the quoted language, I think the writer of the release thought they'd be under 5 USC 552, which uses the "unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" standard for general FOIA disclosures. However, that provision wouldn't apply to this type of record, as there is no general purpose to the information beyond the names and PII contained in it.