Carol Roth’s latest column in The Blaze makes a powerful case for finishing the job on the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA): both repealing the law outright and purging the massive database of sensitive ownership information the government never should have collected.
As Roth writes:
The Trump administration has made Main Street a central priority — and limiting the reach of the Corporate Transparency Act’s Beneficial Ownership Information rule was one of its best decisions so far. The rule required small businesses to hand over sensitive ownership data to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, under threat of heavy fines and criminal penalties. Large corporations were mostly exempt.
After small-business owners and pro-business lawmakers protested, the administration moved quickly. In March, it issued an interim rule exempting U.S. small businesses and citizens from the reporting mandate. Treasury then opened a public comment period to shape a final rule. That comment window closed five months ago, and yet the final rule still hasn’t arrived.
Small-business owners want the exemption locked in for good — not left vulnerable to reversal by a future administration. Ohio Republican Rep. Warren Davidson’s Repealing Big Brother Overreach Act, with nearly 200 co-sponsors, aims to make that exemption permanent. But some lawmakers say they can’t codify until Treasury finalizes the rule. The delay is holding back certainty for millions of entrepreneurs.
Many of those same business owners also want FinCEN to purge the personal data they already submitted before the exemption took effect. With hacking and misuse always possible, they’re demanding the government delete the information it never should have collected.
Getting Rep. Warren Davidson’s Repealing Big Brother Overreach Act enacted is a priority for the Main Street business community. So is purging the database.
More than 16 million small businesses filed their beneficial ownership information with FinCEN before the interim rule took effect. That sensitive personal data (names, addresses, identification numbers) remains on government servers, vulnerable to misuse and cyberattacks.
FinCEN Director Andrea Gacki acknowledged this concern, testifying that the agency intends “to resolve questions around the data that we have collected and dispose of data that is no longer legally required.”
That’s a welcome sign, but it would be nice to see some urgency attached to it. Formalizing the new, more limited CTA rules, purging the FinCEN database, and ultimately repealing the CTA are all commonsense actions the Trump Administration can take now to help Main Street businesses succeed under their watch.