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Overview

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) was signed into law in 2020 and takes effect January 1, 2024. It requires small businesses – those with fewer than 20 employees and less than $5 million in revenue – to disclose a litany of sensitive information to the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) each year.

According to FinCEN’s estimates, the CTA will impact 32.6 million small businesses
in the first year and an additional five to six million
every year thereafter.

The Issue

The stated goal of the Corporate Transparency Act is to crack down on criminals who use shell companies to launder money. But the statute’s approach to combating illicit activity relies on bad actors self-reporting their crimes, rendering it wholly ineffective. Criminals engaged in serious felonies are hardly going to worry about committing a simple paperwork violation. As a result, the law is unlikely to improve compliance and instead subjects tens of millions of small businesses and other entities to increased paperwork, compliance costs, privacy risks, substantial fines, even jail.

What We're Doing

The Main Street Employers Coalition supports efforts to provide affected businesses the relief they need from the CTA’s harmful reporting requirements.

Click the links below to see our recent work: