Beth Milito, Vice President and Executive Director of NFIB’s Small Business Legal Center, joined Viewpoint Alabama last week to update listeners on NFIB’s current efforts to repeal the Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) reporting requirements.

Recently, NFIB launched new ads in Alabama urging Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Congress to permanently repeal the law that established the invasive and unconstitutional Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) mandate, and for the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to immediately destroy all BOI data already submitted by U.S. small businesses.

Listen to Milito’s interview here.

“It’s completely coming at it from the wrong way. It’s targeting law-abiding businesses. I mean, when you think about it, John, if you were opening a business to launder money, would you take time to file a report and file a registry with FinCEN? Absolutely not. But the owners under this law must provide their name, their date of birth, their address, identifying information including a picture of either their passport or their driver’s license. All of this must be entered into this database, online database, for all the owners and those with a significant amount of management in the company too. And anytime any of that information changes, the business would have to reregister with FinCEN. So, a lot of personal information sitting out in this government database, which we all know is, you know, that’s kind of subject to potential privacy violations. I mean, every now and then, you know, we do see breaches of you know, government databases there. So, all this massive amount of information is just sitting out in a federal database.”

[…]

“So, we actually got in front of the White House and got this to the President’s attention and he said, ‘Treasury, you need to stop this.’ So, what happened is the U.S. Treasury Department issued a temporary rule blocking the BOI mandate. So, we have the White House to thank for this block right now. But you know what? It is just a rule. And we need Congress to go in and [permanently] repeal the underlying law that gives Treasury Department authority to capture this BOI information. So, that’s what we’re asking Congress to do now, to go in and permanently repeal the law. And the other thing, John, is before the President stopped the law and put a pause on the reporting requirement, over 16 million small businesses had reported to FinCEN and that information is just sitting in this public database. So, the other thing we’re asking the Treasury Department to do is to wipe out the existing database. So, Congress, overturn the law, and Treasury, wipe out this database there that has this personal information for millions and millions of small businesses.”