Washington Wire
House Hearing on CTA Regs, Database Purge
Earlier this week we covered the latest effort in Congress to make things right when it comes to the Corporate Transparency Act. That starts with deleting the beneficial owner database that’s not just unnecessary but actively puts millions of Americans’ sensitive information at risk.
Thanks in large part to Congressman Warren Davidson, who chairs the Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions, we now have a bit more clarity …
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Purging the CTA Database
Couple important developments to report on the Corporate Transparency Act front.
First, around 90 members of Congress yesterday sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging that the CTA database be purged entirely. It makes clear:
As Congress works to provide long-term relief from the CTA, we urge the Department of Treasury and FinCEN to promulgate a final rule that exempts U.S. businesses from the CTA. We also acknowledge that millions of U.S. small businesses …
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A Sustainable Alternative to Tariffs
One of the nice things about tax policy is that it’s constrained by math. You can push any tax policy you want, but at some point the underlying math will win out.
So while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick might argue that we could replace our income tax with tariff receipts, the math says something else. Here’s The Spectator on the numbers:
…Americans reported $15 trillion in income in 2021, on which they paid $2.2 trillion …
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Horizontal Equity and Section 199A
Thanks to the OB3, Section 199A is now a permanent fixture of the Tax Code. Millions of small and family-owned businesses can now stop worrying about their taxes and refocus on growing and hiring. It’s a good thing that means more investment and jobs on Main Street.
That doesn’t mean the debate is over, however.
A Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, for example, included a nice overview of the provision, but also made a …
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SALT Parity 2.0
One BIG Main Street win in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OB3) was what didn’t happen: Congress rejected ill-considered proposals in both the House and Senate drafts to limit pass-through entity (PTET) deductions for state and local taxes (SALT).
That was huge for many reasons, but primarily because the C corporation down the street continues to fully deduct their SALT. In what rational world is Home Depot allowed to deduct its SALT, but your …
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The Assault on Privacy Continues
Treasury’s rollback of the wildly overbroad Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) reporting requirements was a major step in protecting the privacy of Main Street business owners, but it’s not the only threat out there.
New mandatory country-by-country (CBC) reporting for multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in Australia marks a radical departure from established practices by forcing private enterprises to expose commercially sensitive and personally linked information to the public domain. The regime is disproportionate, intrusive, and …
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Webinar Recap: OBBB Resonates with Voters
Earlier today, S-CORP hosted a webinar featuring David Winston and Myra Miller of The Winston Group, longtime experts in measuring voter attitudes on tax policy. The focus was the One Big Beautiful Bill and its Main Street tax provisions, which are not only good policy but also extremely popular with voters.
So how popular are these provisions?
Very. The Winston Group’s research shows broad, bipartisan support across key items in the bill. For example, Section …
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What’s Next for 199A?
Enactment of the Big Beautiful Bill was a big beautiful win for Main Street – making permanent the lower tax rates, 20-percent deduction for small and family-owned businesses, and the higher estate tax exemptions. All these provisions help pass-through businesses compete with their larger, publicly-owned competition and they help to protect the 2.6 million jobs that depend on the 199A deduction.
With the bill signed into law, what’s next? This from Bloomberg:
“Everyone’s been coming …
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