Outsourcing Accountability Act of 2019
Floor Speech
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Mr. HILL of Arkansas. Mr. Chair, I want to thank the ranking member on our side for offering me time to explain my amendment. I commend my friend from Iowa for her work in this legislation.
Let me make a couple of comments initially about the bill, generally. First of all, I don't think this bill is going to be a disincentive, as she described it, to companies who are recruiting to another State or considering moving to another country, potentially, for supply chain reasons, because, look, they are doing what they think is in the best, long-run interest of building their product.
And, don't forget, our States recruit our companies, countries recruit our companies. We look at supply chains. These are frequently very public matters about Governors bragging how many employees they have from each State and each company.
And the WARN Act, which is already on the statute books, certainly takes care of this issue of notice on layoffs and disclosure of employees.
In my own State recently we had Kimberly-Clark, a publicly traded company, decide to move jobs to Wisconsin. Those jobs were well known in my district and in Mr. Gallagher's district in Wisconsin. There was nothing secret about it. It is just part of business realigning inside our beautiful, largest economy in the world.
And I do have concerns about this disclosure internationally that my friend is requiring, because what if you are proposing to enter a country and you want to keep that private, for competition purposes, from international competition or from your competitors in the United States? You are now forced, as a public company, to disclose, oh, I have one employee in a country.
I find that concerning. You may even put that employee at a safety risk, depending on what country is a target for Americans.
So, in my view, that brings up the topic of overall burden, and we know of the old expression ``the straw that broke the camel's back.''
And regulatory burdens are cumulative. Any one burden doesn't seem large, but, when piled up on all the other burdens, you see it in total.
I was talking to a chief accounting officer the other day of a $2 billion market cap company. She spends $250,000 a year, for example, to comply with the conflict mineral rule. If you have a 10-time multiple on that, that is a lot of money annualized impacting their business to try to comply with something they say is not physically possible to comply with.
So, I look at this as an additional burden. I urge that it not be adopted.
And my amendment does something simple. It just simply says, if this employment disclosure, domestically or internationally, is material to the business, in keeping with the tradition of the securities laws, then okay. So, if it is a material statement to describe where these employees are located to the business, then that might be something useful.
Mr. Chair, I urge adoption of my amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. HILL of Arkansas. Mr. Chair, how much time do I have?
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Mr. HILL of Arkansas. Mr. Chair, my friend from California, I think, is making the case that this bill is confusing and a burden because we don't even know internationally if these are American jobs that were moved or not.
You are just counting the people in foreign countries. I don't know that that is really relevant. And it weakens your argument, in my view, as well, that we are disclosing in the States, as my friend, the ranking member, made so eloquently. So I think it is a burden.
It is not about shipping jobs. We have the WARN Act, which directly deals with jobs that are shipped overseas, or moved, and makes sure that people are retrained and compensated in the right way.
Instead, this is another burden on our public companies, our public companies. We want more public companies.
I just formed the Entrepreneur Caucus with my friends Mr. Foster, Mr. Veasey, Stephanie Murphy, and Steve Chabot. We have asked GAO why we are not having more public companies at smaller sizes.
I submit to you, my friends from California and Iowa, it is because we have raised the cost of being public too high. This is another burden, and I think we should think long and hard before we add burdens.
Materiality is the way to bring balance back.
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Mr. HILL of Arkansas. Mr. Chairman, I don't, but I have time that I will use, so I will use that time to close.
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Mr. HILL of Arkansas. Mr. Chair, let me close by simply saying that we want more public companies. We want to lower the cost of being public. We want to remove barriers from being public. We do that by carefully balancing the regulatory burden to be public.
This bill, which does not enhance any knowledge for investors or do anything important or material, weakens that effort to reduce barriers to being public.
I believe we should have a materiality standard. I urge adoption of my amendment.
Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. HILL of Arkansas. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.
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