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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 05 2019, @01:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the pro-or-con dept.

— 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.

https://www.nfib.com/content/press-release/homepage/house-deals-blow-to-millions-of-small-businesses-by-passing-corporate-transparency-act/

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


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @09:30PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @09:30PM (#916548)

    It would cause unnecessary work, unnecessary risk,

    I'll agree that it will cause "more" work and risk, and maybe you could convince me it causes "excessive" work and risk. However, it is far from unnecessary.

    Currently people can create shell companies, who own shell companies, who own shell companies. They shuffle money around them like so many poker chips, resulting in multi-millionaires (let alone billionaires) who are effectively immune to all public scrutiny and accountability. It's literally the same issue as hidden offshore bank accounts.

    There are also issues of creating shell companies to hide actions, such as trying to do a hostile takeover of a company and hiding their buying of stock, or a a religion trying to literally buy a city piece by piece [insider.com] (or an oil company doing the same, etc).

    If the claim is that sunlight cleanses corruption, I'd think that should apply to business just as much as it does to politicians.

    If you want to argue that it's not worth it or the detriment is more than the benefit, then sure, let's have that discussion. However, don't pretend that this is just pointless bureaucracy, because it isn't.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 07 2019, @10:14PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday November 07 2019, @10:14PM (#917558) Homepage Journal

    Volunteer and do it then. I'm certainly not going to. I'll wrangle ancient and occasionally insane perl, I'll admin servers with multiple different distros, I'll even admin the site itself, but I will not do paperwork.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.