As of January 1, 2024, the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is in force. This legislation mandates qualifying entities to gather, document, and submit their Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) reports to FinCEN. The CTA has implications for a diverse array of millions U.S. registered businesses, whether foreign or domestic.
BOI filing can be a complex and time-consuming process. In this article, we explore the benefits of outsourcing BOI filing to a professional service provider, so you can focus more time on your business while also helping to reduce the chance for errors.
Which businesses are covered by the Corporate Transparency Act?
Every domestic or foreign entity registered to do business in the U.S. is subject to the CTA, unless considered exempt. If your business is a corporation, LLC or other entity, you may be required to submit information about your company’s beneficial owners to FinCEN.
For more information on entities that are exempt from the filing requirement, see The 23 exemptions from the Corporate Transparency Act’s beneficial ownership information reporting requirement.
What are the benefits of working with a professional service provider for BOI filings?
Let’s examine the benefits of outsourcing your company’s BOI filing and what capabilities to look for.
Get a single source of truth for your BOI
A service provider can centralize all your beneficial ownership information in one location. Having a single source of truth for your beneficial ownership reporting requirements because it reduces time spent tracking down correct information, eliminates duplicate data, and minimizes the risk of errors from conflicting data sets.
Convenient dashboard tool and views
A service provider should offer a flexible single pane dashboard that provides a comprehensive overview of your data. Through this dashboard, you can easily view all submitted entities, check status, and organize information by sorting and grouping. Additionally, it should enable you to make updates without the need for re-entering information.
Importantly, these capabilities can alleviate some of the limitations of self-filing where you would have to maintain your own data. For example, while you can obtain a PDF as proof of a BOI filing after submitting to FinCEN, it doesn’t allow you to save a report or monitor the progress of your submission. In addition, if you need to make changes, you cannot reuse the PDF for any future filing needs. All required information must be resubmitted, not just the updated information.
For additional collaboration, a service provider should also offer you the ability to invite stakeholders who need to upload their information, such as beneficial owners, whether internal to the company or external, through a platform generated email. This allows team members to upload their information directly into the platform.