#compliance
Navigate regulatory compliance and maintain audit-ready financial records
Five states — Maine, Connecticut, Delaware, New York, and Colorado — now require written notice before monitoring employees. Maine's 2026 law adds annual re-notice, disclosure during hiring, and $100–$500 fines per violation, while Connecticut's expanded rules take effect October 1, 2026. Here is how to write one monitoring policy that satisfies every state.
EPA's TSCA Section 8(a)(7) rule requires manufacturers and importers of roughly 770 PFAS chemicals to report production, use, and disposal data back to January 1, 2011. The submission window now opens January 31, 2027 (or 60 days after a final scope rule), with proposed exemptions for articles and concentrations at or below 0.1% — here's what small businesses should document now.
Falconry-based bird abatement businesses must book raptors as fixed-asset overhead (roughly $1,500–$3,000+ per bird per year for food, vet care, and equipment) rather than supplies, and cost each contract individually since day rates and permit obligations vary by site and jurisdiction.
FASB's ASU 2026-02 creates Topic 818, the first GAAP framework for environmental credits, splitting carbon offsets, RECs, and RINs into compliance, noncompliance, and voluntary categories with different measurement rules, effective for public companies in fiscal 2028 and private companies in fiscal 2029.
Florida's SB 606 (Section 509.214, effective July 1, 2026) requires restaurants to disclose any non-tax "operations charge" on menus, bills, receipts, and contracts in a font size at least as large as menu item descriptions, and to itemize gratuities, operations charges, and sales tax as separate line items on every receipt.
The FTC's Consumer Review Rule (16 C.F.R. Part 465) took effect October 21, 2024, and in December 2025 the agency sent its first warning letters — with civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation and no small-business exemption. A practical guide to the six prohibited practices, from rating-conditioned rewards to review gating, and a five-step compliance checklist owners can finish in a week.
The FTC's Junk Fees Rule, in effect since May 2025, requires live-event ticket sellers and short-term lodging hosts to display all-in total prices upfront, with violations carrying civil penalties of up to $51,744 each and a $10 million StubHub settlement already on the books.
Home care agencies collect from private pay, Medicaid MCOs, and VA Aid and Attendance on three different timelines while caregiver payroll runs on a fixed biweekly schedule, so tracking AR by payer separately (not blended) is the key to forecasting cash and catching the 2026 EVV hard-edit denials that make unresolved visit exceptions permanently unbillable.
FinCEN's 2025 rule change exempted domestic U.S. companies from filing beneficial ownership reports with the government, but banks still must verify beneficial owners under the CDD Rule at account opening — a one-time cost per bank since February 2026's exceptive relief, not a repeat process for every new account.
California requires Legal Document Assistants to register with a county clerk, post a $25,000 surety bond, and pass one of four education-or-experience tests before charging clients — a licensing and revenue-recognition setup that trips up most first-time LDA owners' books.
Maryland's 3% tech-services tax (effective July 1, 2025) and Washington's ESSB 5814 (effective October 1, 2025) made IT consulting, custom software, data processing, and digital advertising taxable — even for out-of-state sellers past economic nexus thresholds. Here's what's taxable, the contract-renewal trap, and a compliance checklist.
NAR's $52.25 million Tuccori settlement, approved April 10, 2026, doesn't change buyer-agent commission rules — it makes the August 2024 Sitzer/Burnett practice changes permanent, so agents must book gross commission across multiple funding sources rather than treating deposits as a single income line.
