The Washington Wire - The S Corporation Association

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 have already registered with FinCEN. This data must be immediately destroyed to protect the privacy of small business owners.

The letter underscores the reality that …

(Read More)

admin2025-09-09T14:58:23+00:00September 9, 2025|

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 in income taxes for an average tax rate of 14.9 percent. In the same year, goods imports were $2.8 trillion, generating $80 billion in revenue …

(Read More)

admin2025-08-21T16:24:31+00:00August 21, 2025|

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 point about horizontal equity we’ve seen previously:

The deduction may diminish horizontal tax equity in two ways. First, it taxes wage earners and pass-through business owners …

(Read More)

admin2025-08-15T13:40:54+00:00August 15, 2025|

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 local hardware store is not?

In place of limiting PTET deduction, Congress instead voted to temporarily raise the individual SALT cap from $10,000 to $40,000. What …

(Read More)

admin2025-08-01T13:50:11+00:00August 1, 2025|

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 constitutes a violation of the privacy of the businesses and the individuals who own them. As PWC notes:

The Australian Parliament has passed legislation that …

(Read More)

admin2025-07-30T21:07:59+00:00July 30, 2025|