A federal judge in Texas Tuesday granted a preliminary injunction, putting the enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act on hold just weeks before its filing deadline.
In the case Texas Top Cop Shop vs. Merrick Garland, Judge Amos Mazzant of the U.S. District Court of Eastern Texas stated the act was “likely unconstitutional as outside of Congress’ power,” and granted the request of an injunction to be applied nationwide. The ruling also stayed the Jan. 1, 2025, deadline for companies to file the Beneficial Ownership Information.
“[The CTA] represents Congress’s attempt to combat bad actors’ ability to cloak their criminal activities in a veil of corporate anonymity,” Mazzant wrote. “At its most rudimentary level, the CTA regulates companies that are registered to do business under a state’s laws and requires those companies to report their ownership, including detailed, personal information about their owners, to the federal government on pain of severe penalties. Though seemingly benign, this federal mandate marks a drastic two-fold departure from history. First, it represents a Federal attempt to monitor companies created under state law—a matter our federalist system has left almost exclusively to the several states. Second, the CTA ends a feature of corporate formation as designed by various states—anonymity. For good reason, plaintiffs fear this flanking, quasiOrwellian statute and its implications on our dual system of government. As a result, plaintiffs contend that the CTA violates the promises our Constitution makes to the People and the States. Despite attempting to reconcile the CTA with the Constitution at every turn, the government is unable to provide the court with any tenable theory that the CTA falls within Congress’s power. And even in the face of the deference the court must give Congress, the CTA appears likely unconstitutional. Accordingly, the CTA and its implementing regulations must be enjoined.”
Effective Jan. 1, 2024, the CTA requires many companies, including many NIADA dealer members, to report information about their beneficial owners to the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”). The information was due by Jan. 1, 2025 for entities in existence as of Dec. 31, 2023, and within 90 days of formation for entities that were formed in 2024.
Required information to be reported in the initial BOI report about the reporting company includes: (a) its full legal name; (b) any trade names, “doing business as”, or “trading as” names; (c) the current street address of its principal place of business if that address is in the U.S., or, for reporting companies whose principal place of business is outside the U.S., the current address from which the company conducts business in the U.S.; (d) its jurisdiction of formation or registration; and (e) its Taxpayer Identification Number.
Required information to be reported in the initial report about each beneficial owner include: (a) the individual’s name; (b) date of birth; (c) residential address; and (d) an identifying number from an acceptable identification document such as a passport or U.S. driver’s license, and the name of the issuing state or jurisdiction of identification document.
The penalties for filing false beneficial ownership information or for failure to report or update beneficial ownership information are: (i) civil penalties of $500 for each day that the violation continues or has not been remedied; and (ii) a criminal fine of up to $10,000, imprisonment for up to two years, or both.
An appeal of the ruling has not been announced by the Justice Department, according to Bloomberg Law.
