Corporate Transparency Act - Supreme Court update

UPDATE: Treasury announces March 2, 2025 it will not enforce the Corporate Transparency act

On January 24, 2025, the Supreme Court reinstated the Corporate Transparency Act stayed by the 5th Circuit in December of 2024.

Back in December, the 5th Circuit upheld a temporary stay of the corporate transparency act, which requires those with a beneficial ownership interest in various corporate entities to register with the the federal government. See the previous blog post on the law here.

At the last update at the end of 2024, the January 1, 2025 deadlines were fast approaching, but the 5th Circuit's last-minute intervention put enforcement on hold. Today, the Supreme Court reversed the 5th Circuit's temporary stay, but the ruling has little effect at the moment because a separate stay was granted by another trial court on January 7, 2025, and that separate stay has yet to be appealed. It seems unlikely that the temporary stay will result in a different outcome than the first temporary stay, but stay tuned.

More specifically, the original trial court halted enforcement in early December, and in late December, the 5th Circuit agreed with the trial court that enforcement should be delayed while the litigation ran it's course. Today, the Supreme Court overruled the December temporary stay, but no appellate court has ruled on the parallel stay granted a few weeks ago. Here is the Wall Street Journal's latest update, including an official statement from FINCEN that enforcement is still on hold.

For anyone who has not yet done so and who doesn't want to keep chasing news on the law as it develops, the safest approach to avoid penalties would be to proceed with registering your ownership interests at https://fincen.gov/boi