It’s always interesting when one or the other of the Congressional small business committees holds a hearing on an issue that is of critical importance to microbusinesses and manages to get through the entire proceeding without talking about microbusinesses at all. That is essentially what happened earlier this month when the House Committee on Small [...]

Right around tax day, the National Small Business Association (NSBA) released the results of its 2011 Small Business Taxation Survey, because that’s what we all want to do at that time of year: talk taxes. The survey demonstrated yet another instance in which there was a critical microbusiness issue but, evidently, there weren’t very many [...]

Earlier this month, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olsen released her Annual Report to Congress for FY 2010 and she has once again named tax code complexity as the most serious problem impacting taxpayers. The time for tax reform, according to the report, is right now. That is certainly something everybody in the small business community [...]

National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olsen has issued her annual report to Congress, in which she is required to describe for policy makers the taxpayers’ major challenges for that particular fiscal year. Olsen adds her voice to the growing chorus of dismayed observers who express concern about the newly increased reporting requirements contained in the Patient [...]

Amidst all the jumping up and down and yelling about the health care reform bill that was signed into law earlier this year, very little attention was paid to an obscure provision about 1099s. But that obscure tax provision is expected to increased the tax compliance paperwork burden for microbusinesses by an absurd 1250%, according [...]

I suppose it’s possible that all sorts of Americans in different circumstances and different walks of life might have different ways of “celebrating” April 15th — Tax Day — in addition to a dramatic wipe of the brow and a declaration that it’s Miller Time®. On Capitol Hill, where it probably should not be expected [...]

Late last month, the House passed the Small Business and Infrastructure Jobs Tax Act of 2010 (H.R. 4849), which does all sorts of things that are supposed to inspire small business owners to create jobs while simultaneously including enough revenue raisers to avoid falling afoul of those PAYGO rules. For example, this bill attempts to [...]

Now, it is entirely possible that another hearing before another committee would have produced the sorts of witnesses who would have gratified that particular questioner with answers that reinforced his pre-existing ideas.

If you watch enough of these hearings, you see it fairly frequently. The Committee Member will question their own witness or someone who they can tell from prepared testimony already agrees with them. They will phrase questions in such a way as to get the witness to make their favorite points for them. It is all for the sake of the record.

But we have to be glad that didn’t happen in this case, because nobody learns anything that way, do they?

As much as I enjoy myth-busting, there is one bit of Congressional lore that I would have a difficult time refuting: tax-writing Congressional committees under Democrats are not friendly to small businesses. House Small Business Committee Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) has openly said that the Ways and Means Committee was not particularly friendly to small [...]

Earlier this month, the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE) was working Capitol Hill with a single, simple message: “Dear Congress, Please take it easy on the small business owner.” An excellent opportunity for that sort of thing presented itself when the House Small Business Committee, Subcommittee on Finance and Tax, held its first hearing [...]