Comment by nickff

5 hours ago

As someone who lives in a jurisdiction which does require such disclosure: it is a significant inconvenience for small businesses, and no benefit to the general public.

4 comments

nickff

Reply
walrus01  5 hours ago

Do small businesses in your area have complicated ownership structures that it's significantly inconvenient to disclose the one family that owns, for an example small business , a plumbing repair company with 4 vans and 6 employees?

  • roenxi  4 hours ago

    They might? If they don't and it is trivial to identify the beneficial owner, why is it necessary to create a requirement to disclose? The practical experience is that people are quite bad at this sort of requirement, that may well be a source of problems and that on aggregate making it harder to do business has a notable impact [0] on general prosperity. Don't needlessly put barriers in front of people who create wealth.

    It isn't a stretch to imagine that a small business owner literally doesn't have enough time in their life to maintain their own health and run their business. There are some pretty grim stories out there, I can tell one based on a friend of mine who was working ... I think 70 hour weeks. Sounded rough. It isn't actually crazy to say they may not have an hour free to figure out what form they need to fill out and where to file it, or that they'd be too sleep deprived to get it right. Assuming that this thing is the only thing they need to disclose and there aren't any other pieces of paperwork that need filing (which we all know there will be).

    Sure if they have to they'll probably figure it out in most cases, maybe it is trivial. But the businesses where a straw broke the camel's back don't exist any more to point at as evidence. It is hard to know.

    [0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation

  • Aerroon  4 hours ago

    You get extra spam. Any data that ends up on those public lists will be used to spam you. Some websites will also correlate all the data they have on you too, so you can get that spam at home too.

    Basically, you have no privacy if you start a small business under these kinds of rules.