The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is an aggressive domestic program to federally register millions of unsuspecting small business owners under the guise of an “anti-money laundering initiative.”
By the end of this year, Americans will be required to hand over their small businesses’ private data — such as owners’ names and home addresses — to the federal government’s law enforcement database, operated by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), housed under the Department of the Treasury. Such small businesses include limited liability companies, corporations, “and any other entities created by the filing of a document with a secretary of state or any similar office in the United States.”
They will also be required to turn over personal data, which can include uploading their driver’s license, passport, marriage certificate, and other non-business related information, into this law enforcement database.
This needs to be a front and center campaign issue to protect more than 33 million small business owners, who employ 61 million Americans.
The Department of the Treasury already has a history of targeting innocent Americans. During the Lois Lerner scandal, the IRS was forced to admit that it used political partisanship to specifically target conservative groups. The unelected bureaucracy was ultimately forced to settle with the innocent Americans they targeted.
CTA is the for-profit equivalent of Department of the Treasury’s partisan overreach. With the IRS scandal, nonprofit organizations with the word “tea party” and “patriot” were targeted and subjected to further scrutiny and/or outright denial of their tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status.
