https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/nationwid...
To win a preliminary injunction you must show:
1. Likelihood of success on the merits
2. Irreparable harm without it
3. Balance of harms favors you
4. Injunction is in the public interest.
How?
For many other small businesses, it is not.
There are millions of businesses which still operate largely on paper invoices and registers. Owners can't understand the text of the BOI website or the technical requirements, which includes registering for Login.gov.
Others are completely engrossed in their day to day operations and won't even hear about the dire warnings from an obscure federal agency. If they happen to check the Yahoo or Hotmail accounts they use for their business (often their personal communications too) they are just as likely to ignore it as spam.
That leaves it up to local accountants to fill the gap. Many don't know, or aren't keeping track of this because it's not a tax thing. When I asked my accountant about it she didn't answer for more than a month, and then sent out an explanation to all of her clients along with the following message:
If you want to engage us to prepare the BOI, our hourly rate is $250 will apply, with a one hour minimum. To minimize your fee, it is imperative for you to provide us with all the information required at once. Please contact our office if you wish us to prepare the BOI and we will send an engagement letter that will need to be signed and a list of documents we will need to prepare the BOI.
Ignoring the $500 per day fines and threat of prison time, can you see how dealing with this is a non-starter for a lot of small businesses?
The bigger issue is knowing that it’s needed. I wouldn’t have known about it without seeing this post on HN.
Reading what the AG said about it he seems to feel it's a major intrusion for the government to require identifying the owners. I think that's what this is about--exposing the shell corporations. And of course the people who are keeping dirty books won't like that.
> There are millions of businesses which still operate largely on paper invoices and registers
I don't remember, but there's only like at most 10 screens and each is relatively short.
Or the local restaurant owner from Guatemala in the nearest town who only takes cash, and has no mechanism for orders other than pointing at the menu or picking up the phone.
A fact that seems to be lost on many tech people in coastal cities is technology literacy is limited. A 2016 OECD skills survey laid out the problem with very deep data across developed countries:
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_978926...
If you want a summary, this stat should stand out: "26% of adults were unable to use a computer"
If they know enough to register and report as an LLC or Corporation then they likely know enough to fill out this report.
I agree with you on the disparity in tech knowledge among small businesses. And probably they'll never hear about this report.
They manged to form an LLC but can't fill out an additional simple form? Come on man be for real.
It's literally just the names and govID numbers of the beneficial owners. All the info you need is a picture of the driver's license for each owner. That's it. Not a single figure. No percentage of ownership or shares etc. Requires absolutely zero accounting.
Also, the website requires no login, lessening the burden. (Actually for a gov website I thought it was pretty well designed, with clear help/explanations, etc.)
Your accountant is souping it up.
I also run a small business, I had never heard of this. No one reached out to me, I was not notified in any way. For something that can threaten my freedom, it's a real shocker, the only way I heard about this is because this guy told me. Oh yeah, I also got some random text messages that seemed like spam, probably from one of these parasites trying to charge $300 to fill out a form.
You're absolutely right in your analysis.
How many forms how many times a year do we need to fill out to be able to be free commercially? Are you free if you can be fined and thrown in jail for not filling out paperwork?
It all adds up and doesn’t add any value.
But why are we adding draconian punishments for new business paperwork?
Why are you ok with that part?
Why shouldn’t this just be a fine?
We really should not be ok with this if you wouldn’t personally be ok with a friend going to jail who failed to file. I, for one, am definitely not.
It’s crazy we accept this. Where is the proof any of this is working at all?
Could you share a source for that?
My accountant wants $160 to do that for me. If I could do it in 5-10 minutes I would definitely do it myself.
The problem that I have (and many other LLCs I'd guess) it's not that the report is complicated, it's that I (we) don't even know where to start ...
And what's burdensome about it? (Now, a case could definitely be made for it being stupid duplicated effort. Every year I'm annoyed with FinCen over having to file a form about foreign accounts--almost all of the information also appears on our tax return. However, it's a minute or two of cut and paste once a year, no great burden.)
It's likely to end up becoming law eventually. The requirements of this rule are not burdensome and they are directly related to the laws that FinCEN was created to enforce.
Also, we have information exchange treaties with multiple countries that require us to collect some of this information. We haven't been upholding our end of those treaties and this law was intended to bring us toward compliance.
This doesn't even touch the government, as a whole's, less than stellar record as it comes to protecting PII from improper disclosure. CTA, as written and implemented, creates a wide array of real and potential harms. It's bad law, as it stands.
The IRS could conform the treatment of LLCs to the way other limited liability entities are treated... as entities subject to taxation in their own right.
IMO that would arguably be the more correct option, but it would also remove the sort of information pool that can enable leakage or fishing expeditions the current law seems aimed to generate.