On December 26, 2024, a different panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued an order vacating the Court’s December 23, 2024 order granting a stay of the preliminary injunction. 

Accordingly, as of December 26, 2024, the injunction issued by the district court in Texas Top Cop Shop, Inc. v. Garland is in effect and reporting companies are not currently required to file beneficial ownership information with FinCEN. 

BOI Injunction lifted, the report is, once again, MANDATORY nationwide, unless specifically exempted!

On Monday, December 23, 2024, The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction previously barring the Corporate Transparency Act enforcement.

There are new, extended deadlines.

Now, companies, whose original deadline was January 1, 2025 have until January 13th, 2025 to submit the BOI.

If you’re a new company created in 2024, you originally had 90 days to file the report. It’s still the case, however, if your original 90-day deadline fell between December 3, 2024 and December 23, 2024, you also have until January 13, 2025 to file the report.

If you created a company between December 3, 2024, and December 23, 2024, you’ll have an additional 21 days from the original deadline to submit BOI.

Companies that qualify for disaster relief will have more time to file their reports. Each storm, (hurricanes Debby, Helene, Milton, and others) have their own deadlines. If you qualify for the disaster relief extended deadlines, you should follow the deadline that falls later.

On 12/3/24 a Texas Federal Court preliminarily blocked the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), which requires almost all US businesses to file Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) Report with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

The CTA was enacted on January 1, 2021 and it went into effect in 2024. The government argued that the Act was designed to crack down on illicit businesses and money laundering, but Judge Mazzant concluded that if a business merely files its registration documents and hasn’t started any interstate or foreign commerce, the government can’t regulate its every aspect, especially that the CTA itself does not regulate commerce.

This injunction has a nationwide application, meaning nobody is required to file the BOI report at the moment. It’s still possible to file the BOI report on the FinCEN website, and it’s still free of charge. However, FinCEN has posted a statement that the BOI report is currently “voluntary”. The government has filed an appeal on 12/5/24.

Whether you should file the report is difficult to say. The Corporate Transparency Act has faced push-back both in the courts and from lawmakers from the very beginning. Out of numerous previous litigations, only the one in Alabama, which took place in March of 2024, held the CTA unconstitutional, but that injunction only applied to the plaintiffs, it was not nationwide. All other courts declined plaintiffs’ motions for preliminary injunction.

Please note, the Texas court decision does not mean that the CTA is “unconstitutional”, it only means the Act is “likely” unconstitutional. Nobody knows what to expect next. If the Texas court ruling is overturned, the BOI reporting requirement will return. For that reason, if gathering information for the BOI is not time- or cost-consuming, it might be prudent to have the information readily available. The only best thing to do is to stay alert and be ready for any turn of events.

The accounting profession was formerly recognized in 1896 with the establishment of Certified Public Accountant (CPA) title.

In 1913 the United States began to charge income tax to fund the upcoming World War and the demand for accountants increased significantly.

However, the birth of accounting dates back thousands of years and most likely emerged under a barter system. It’s believed that Mesopotamia (a region of southwest Asia) tribes started the bartering system back in 6000 BC, which is around 8,000 years ago! This is where the earliest evidence of accounting language comes from. However, at the time, the accounting language was very different and only used a “single-entry” bookkeeping system.

In 1494, an Italian monk Luca Pacioli laid the groundwork for modern accounting by publishing a textbook and showing the merits of a “double-entry” system for bookkeeping.

The creation of railroads in the United States transformed simple bookkeeping into the actual accounting practice. The first charter in the US can be traced back to 1815, which was granted to Colonel John Stevens to build the New Jersey Railroad Company, though it wasn’t constructed until 1832. Construction and operation of railroads were very expensive and required evaluation of the most efficient ways to do business. This required detailed accounting of costs, estimates, and numerous financial statement metrics.

Railroads in the United States transformed its economy and encouraged investment, which also put more emphasis on the accounting profession. In 1887 The American Association of Public Accountants (AAPA) was established to ensure that accountants were ethical and competent professionals. It was succeeded by the Institute of Public Accountants in 1917 and remained so until 1957, when it changed its name to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), as it is known today. Nowadays, the AICPA is a nonprofit organization that sets standards for CPAs and has a wide range of influence, it provides support to the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and even works with the SEC.