Lankford Urges Senate To Permanently Overturn ‘Absurd’ Biden Small Business Reporting Rule

 Oklahoma Senator James Lankford urged his colleagues to permanently overturn an “absurd” Biden-era regulation that requires small business owners to report personal information to the federal government. 

Lankford told The Daily Wire that the Senate should follow the Trump administration’s lead and prohibit enforcement of the beneficial ownership information reporting requirements for American companies. The rule, as promulgated by the Biden administration, required people who had direct or indirect control of a company to report their name, birthdate, address, and a unique identifying number to the Treasury Department.

“There is no way anyone is going to ever tell me and convince me that the Constitution allows the federal government to go to every small business and say, ‘tell me who your influences are and send me that in a form’. That is not the job of the federal government to go do that,” Lankford told The Daily Wire. 

The Trump administration announced on Sunday that it would stop enforcing the rule for domestic businesses and that it would be promulgating a new rule only applicable to foreign companies. 

Lankford said that the Biden administration had taken a statute that was “snuck” into a National Defense Authorization Act to supposedly combat money laundering and created an “over-burdensome” and “quasi-Orwellian” unconstitutional rule that did more to harm honest small business owners than illicit companies. 

He said the rule made a massive “assumption that companies that are laundering drug money will suddenly at that moment become honest and report that they are actually being controlled by a drug kingpin. The practical effect of the rule was to force small business owners to prove that they were laundering drug money,” Lankford said. 

Consequences for not complying with the form, which Lankford said many small businesses were unaware of, could include a $10,000 fine and up to two years in prison. 

“Small businesses don’t get up every day and read the federal register to be able to find out what it is the federal government is now imposing on them as a new regulation for a new piece of paper to be able to get in or face jail,” he said. “They’re getting up and turning lights on, cleaning toilets, and doing all the things they need to do to get their business going that day.”

Senate Republicans have previously introduced multiple bills to challenge the rule and Lankford said that the Senate Banking Committee is expected to hear one of the proposals in light of the decision from the Trump administration. Recently, Republicans on the committee introduced a measure that would have bumped the deadline for small businesses to report the required information. 

Last month, the House of Representatives voted unanimously to extend the deadline for businesses to respond to the Treasury Department, which had previously been scheduled for March 21. 

“This is one of those things that every small business just wants this gone so that they don’t have to think about it all the time and be worried about if they are going to go to jail tomorrow because of a form not being filled out,” Lankford told The Daily Wire.