Can the Idaho congressional delegation do it again?

In July, Idaho’s U.S. Senators Mike Crapo and James Risch and U.S. Representatives Russ Fulcher and Mike Simpson stood up, spoke out and helped carry the day for small businesses by voting for the tax legislation that made the Small Business Tax Deduction permanent. Their leadership averted a massive tax hike on more than 33 million small business owners across the country and will allow Main Street entrepreneurs to remain open, invest in their workforce, and give back to their communities.

Now, for an encore

Let’s stop making presumptive criminals out of small business owners for the mere fact of owning a small business.

In a mad dash to root out suspected money launderers and tax cheats, beginning on Jan. 1, 2024, federal lawmakers required small businesses with 20 or fewer employees and $5 million or less in sales to register their beneficial ownership information (BOI) with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

“The government thought it would be great to threaten small business owners with up to two years in prison and up to $10,000 of fines if they don’t submit basic paperwork to the government,” said Brad Close, president of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) on a recent radio interview.

NFIB and its small business owner members worked to notify the Trump administration of these burdensome impacts as soon as possible. “We had some really good conversations with them, gave them some stories and told them what this impact was,” added Close. “They saw this as a huge regulatory burden on the very small businesses they were trying to help all across the country. So, the president pretty quickly changed the rule to make this only apply to foreign-based businesses, to exempt any U.S. businesses.”

But what about the records of the millions of small businesses that had already complied with the BOI requirements before the exemption was granted?

Thankfully, FinCEN recently committed to destroying the personal information it’s already collected to prevent it from being exposed to potential hackers. “FinCEN’s announcement that they will destroy the unconstitutionally collected BOI data of America’s small businesses and issue a final rule by the end of the year is a major win for Main Street,” said Close in a news release.

Final step

NFIB is now calling on Congress to repeal the Corporate Transparency Act entirely, so no future White House could easily restart it. The Repealing Big Brother Overreach Act would accomplish this goal. I’m happy to report that Sen. Risch and Reps. Fulcher and Simpson are on board as co-sponsors. We need Sen. Crapo to maintain his solid support for small business and sign on to repeal this unconstitutional and burdensome law.

The BOI reporting requirement is a strange way to treat small business owners – the people who came in first in Gallup’s latest Confidence in Institutions’ report. Our state’s 208,000 small businesses are the foundation of our economy and communities, accounting for 99.2% of all businesses and employing 66.3% of all workers in our state.

In Gallup’s report, 70% of Americans have a ‘Great Deal/Quite a Lot’ of confidence in small businesses as an institution, which bests organized labor’s 29% tally and big businesses’ 15%. Repealing the BOI law would protect small business owners from its threats to their privacy, security, and constitutional rights, nicely complementing the way Congress recently protected Main Street from a massive tax hike when it made the 20% Small Business Deduction permanent.

Suzanne Budge is state director for NFIB in Idaho and a public affairs and government relations professional since 1989.