In case you didn’t know it, if you accept credit card payments, you need to be in compliance with the data security standards developed by the PCI Security Standards Council. That’s true whether you are a point-of-service merchant who swipes your customers’ credit cards or whether you are an online microbusiness merchant who never sees [...]

The reason why it is so difficult for government and small businesses to deal with each other in any context seems to be that very few in the government understand how small businesses operate. The only people who seem receptive to this message are folks who already know it.

Just as too many lawmakers appear to believe they are doing enough for the economy by crafting policy focused on large businesses, so too many federal bureaucrats believe they can treat all businesses like they treat large businesses, without ill effects.

Those of us who arrived online in the mid to late 1990s with the first major wave of Internet-based microbusinesses sometimes forget that there will always be newbies. And, for as long as there are newbies, there will be scammers. Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it had secured a contempt order [...]

He missed it. During the hearing that was the subject of our lead article this week, restaurant owner Colleen Taylor Reinhard tried to explain a slice of the financial lives of small business owners to Senator John Kerry. Small business owners don’t have savings to invest in energy efficient technology, she told him. We generally [...]

Given what is happening in the rest of the economy, it should come as no surprise that most taxpayers are filing, on the lookout for a tax refund that can give them a bit of fiscal breathing room. Still, there are always those last-minute types — including a certain number of microbusiness owners who may [...]