Press Releases

2010 Micro-Business Year In Review

The NASE also celebrated over two decades of helping members send their dependents to college through the NASE Scholarship Program. In 2010, the program helped 20 families send their students to college, in addition to the recipient of the substantial NASE Future Entrepreneur Scholarship. Since the program was started in 1989 as a way to invest in the future of entrepreneurship, over $1.9 million has been awarded to the dependents of NASE Members.

The NASE is happy to help assist micro-business owners in other ways, as well. The NASE has been working with the Obama Administration to make sure that the needs of small-business owners are not forgotten. To that end, a group of NASE Members attended a live taping of a town hall-style meeting with President Barack Obama on MSNBC during the summer. The NASE launched a public awareness campaign, aimed at policymakers, to combat the stereotype that the nation’s smallest businesses do not make serious contributions to the economy. In fact, the self-employed represent three-quarters of the nation’s small businesses and contribute over $1 trillion to the economy.

The Association remains in contact with members of Congress to offer information on helping micro-business. In 2010, the NASE spoke up on a number of issues, including worker classification definitions, harmful increased reporting requirements passed under the health care law, support for the creation of a standard home office deduction and support for a small business bill with tax incentives and increased funding for small business programs.  

This year, amid the conversations by lawmakers on how to craft health care policy and create jobs, the micro-business community received a nod from the White House and Congress when the Small Business Jobs and Credit Act (H.R. 5297) became law in September. The law included a monumentally important deduction for sole proprietors on their health care costs for 2010. In past, sole proprietorships were the only business entity that were unable to deduct their health insurance premiums as a business expense. Though the NASE would have preferred that the deduction become permanent, the law’s one-year deduction is an important step in the fight. The law also included an increase in the deduction for new businesses, from $5,000 to $10,000.

The NASE stayed visible in efforts to address a harmful provision set to affect the self-employed in 2012. Passed under the health care law was an increased reporting requirement for businesses involving the IRS Form 1099.  The provision calls for business owners to fill out a 1099 for every transaction over $600 to a service provider or vendor. The Form 1099 reporting system has historically been utilized for payments made to independent contractors. Since forty percent of NASE members perform their business’s accounting functions on their own, they expect the new law to increase the amount of paperwork they do each year by over one-thousand percent. This issue, which had bi-partisan legislation introduced in Congress to repeal this harmful provision in 2010, will remain a top association priority in 2011.

Following the success of the NASE’s Tax Seminar program in 2008 and 2009, in March the NASE’s National Tax Advisor Keith Hall held fourteen seminars across the country to share micro-business tax strategies and to bring together fellow NASE Members.

Visit the NASE on the Web (www.NASE.org) for more micro-business programs and news, including information on business grants and scholarships. For a list of legislative priorities, click on “Advocacy.”