The U.S. Department of the Treasury on Sunday announced it won’t enforce the penalties or fines associated with the Biden-era “beneficial ownership information,” or BOI, reporting requirements for millions of domestic businesses. 

Enacted via the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021 to fight illicit finance and shell company formation, BOI reporting requires small businesses to identify who directly or indirectly owns or controls the company to the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN.

After previous court delays, the Treasury in late February set a March 21 deadline to comply or risk civil penalties of up to $591 a day, adjusted for inflation, or criminal fines of up to $10,000 and up to two years in prison. The reporting requirements could apply to roughly 32.6 million businesses, according to federal estimates.     

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The rule was enacted to “make it harder for bad actors to hide or benefit from their ill-gotten gains through shell companies or other opaque ownership structures,” according to FinCEN.

In addition to not enforcing BOI penalties and fines, the Treasury said it would issue a proposed regulation to apply the rule to foreign reporting companies only. 

President Donald Trump praised the news in a Truth Social post on Sunday night, describing the reporting rule as “outrageous and invasive” and “an absolute disaster” for small businesses.

Other experts say the Treasury’s decision could have ramifications for national security.

“This decision threatens to make the United States a magnet for foreign criminals, from drug cartels to fraudsters to terrorist organizations,” Scott Greytak, director of advocacy for anticorruption organization Transparency International U.S., said in a statement.

Greg Iacurci contributed to this reporting.

For years, restrictive student visa policies in the U.S. have been a drag on college enrollment among international students. President Donald Trump’s proposed “gold card” could change that for some wealthy college hopefuls.

While the details of the initiative remain unclear, experts say the gold card visa program could offer these students from overseas a path to citizenship in return for $5 million.

“Over the past 24 hours, we received an unusual influx of inquiries from students in China, Korea and India because of Trump’s gold card visa,” Christopher Rim, president and CEO of college consulting firm Command Education, said Thursday, two days after Trump first floated the idea.

“Now these wealthy international students have a clear path of staying in the country after graduation,” he said.

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Currently, there are more than 1.1 million international undergraduate and graduate students in the U.S., mostly from India and China, making up slightly less than 6% of the total U.S. higher education population, according to the latest Open Doors data, released by the U.S. Department of State and the Institute of International Education.

“It’s a relatively small cohort but these policies can have great value,” said Robert Franek, editor-in-chief of The Princeton Review.

International enrollment is an important source of revenue for schools like New York University and Columbia University, which is why colleges tend to admit more foreign students, who typically pay full tuition, according to Franek. 

“We know those students are incredibly attractive because they are not applying for financial aid,” he said.

In fact, “more than 95% of four-year colleges in the U.S. are tuition driven,” Franek said. “For schools dependent on students paying tuition, we know this [visa option] is going to be a benefit.”

Altogether, international student enrollment contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023-2024 academic year, according to a separate report by NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

Higher education already costs more than most families can afford, and college costs are still rising. 

Tuition and fees plus room and board for a four-year private college averaged $58,600 in the 2024-25 school year, up from $56,390 a year earlier, the College Board found. At four-year, in-state public colleges, it was $24,920, up from $24,080.

For far more families, financial aid is crucial when it comes to covering the cost of college, and particularly for students from low-income, first-generation or minority backgrounds.

As Congress debates how to handle trillions of dollars in expiring tax breaks, lawmakers on both sides have been lobbing claims about which consumers will see the biggest benefits from extending them. Economists and tax experts say the answer isn’t so straightforward.

In short: Who benefits depends on your frame of reference.

House Republicans passed a budget plan Tuesday that lays the groundwork to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a package of tax cuts enacted in 2017 during President Trump’s first term.

Many of the cuts for individual taxpayers will expire after 2025 unless Congress acts — and the GOP can do this with a simple majority vote in Congress by using a special legislative maneuver called budget reconciliation.

Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., ranking member of the House Ways and Means tax committee, said Wednesday that Republicans’ policy plan — central to which is an extension of the Trump tax cuts, estimated to cost more than $4 trillion — amounts to a “reverse Robin Hood scam” that gives to the rich and takes from the poor.

Meanwhile, Republicans say low- and middle-income households stand to win under the plan.

“Extending the Trump tax cuts delivers the biggest relief to working-class Americans and small businesses in a generation,” Rep. Jason Smith, R-Missouri, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said Tuesday.

Experts say both sides’ arguments have merit.

“The interesting thing is both can be true, depending on how you interpret what they’re saying,” said James Hines, a law and economics professor at the University of Michigan and research director in its Office of Tax Policy Research.

If TCJA provisions are extended, 62% of tax filers would see lower tax bills in 2026, compared to if the measures expire, according to the Tax Foundation. (Put another way, many people’s tax bills would increase next year without an extension.)

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With those provisions in place, Americans would get a 2.9% boost in income after taxes in 2026, on average, according to the Tax Foundation. Income would rise by 3.4% if factoring in broader impacts of the tax cut on the U.S. economy, it said.

A U.S. Treasury Department report issued in the waning days of the Biden administration had a similar finding: The average person would get a 2.2% tax cut by extending the Trump law. (Its estimate is for the 2025 budget year.)

All income groups would get a boost in after-tax income, Treasury said.

Household in the top 5% — who earn over $450,000 a year, roughly — are the “biggest winners,” according to a July 2024 analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. They’d get over 45% of the benefits of extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it said.

A Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis on the impacts of the broad Republican tax plan had a similar finding.

The bottom 80% of income earners would get 29% of the total value of proposed tax cuts in 2026, according to the Wharton analysis, issued Thursday. The top 10% would get 56% of the value, it said.

This dynamic speaks to Democrats’ arguments, especially when coupled with possible spending cuts for programs like Medicaid and food stamps. Such programs largely benefit lower earners.

Wharton estimates that the combination of tax cuts and spending reductions for programs like Medicaid and food stamps would leave “low-income households worse off,” even after accounting for economic growth.

Some tax analysts view after-tax income as among the best frames of reference to assess policy impact, because it estimates how much a household’s buying power improves. Others disagree, however, saying it’s hard to control for other economic variables that might alter income.

The top 1% of households (who make about $1 million or more a year) would get a 3.2% boost in after-tax income in 2027 via an extension of the Trump law, the Tax Policy Center said. In dollar terms, their tax savings would be about $70,000, on average.

By comparison, middle-income households, would get a 1.3% income boost, or a $1,000 tax cut, according to the Tax Policy Center.

The top 1% paid 40% of all U.S. income taxes collected in 2022, according to a recent Tax Foundation analysis. The bottom 90% paid about a quarter — 28% — of total income tax.

“Democrats say most of the tax dollars went to the rich: They’re absolutely correct,” Hines said.

However, the TCJA cut taxes more for working families than rich families on a proportional basis, a White House spokesperson said.

Experts agreed with that assessment.

“Republicans say, ‘But the cuts were not slanted to the rich compared to how much people were paying originally,” which is also generally correct, Hines said.

For example, the bottom 50% of Americans saw their average federal tax rate fall by 15% from 2017 to 2018, after the Trump tax cut took effect, according to the Tax Foundation. (Their rate fell to 3.4% from 4%.)

By contrast, the top 1% saw their average rate decline by a lesser percentage (about 5%) during that period, to 25.4% from 26.8%.

“The reason why the debate is so fractured is there are elements of truth to both sides,” said Garrett Watson, director of policy analysis at the Tax Foundation. “It’s a battle of metrics, and what weight to place on each of them.”