Improving Access to Small Business Information Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mrs. KIM. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of my bill, H.R. 3351, the Improving Access to Small Business Information Act.

Orange County, which I am proud to represent, is home to over 100,000 small businesses. It takes grit, perseverance, and commitment for entrepreneurs to make an idea into a reality.

To help with some of those challenges facing small businesses, the Securities and Exchange Commission created an Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation.

Each year, the Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation hosts events across the country, including California.

These events aim to support small businesses and better understand the issues that they face in raising funds. Unfortunately, burdensome regulations often prevent the advocate from asking the right type of questions.

The former director of the Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation, Ms. Martha Miller, said that: The office went through a yearlong process just to collect registration information for our annual forum and ask a few basic questions to understand the audience attending.

The unfortunate truth is that regulations handicap us from understanding the needs of small businesses.

My bill is very simple. The legislation would specify that activities like conducting field surveys carried out by the Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation are not a collection of information under the Paperwork Reduction Act.

Currently, OMB's approval process is prolonged and bureaucratic, which delays feedback collection from small businesses and their investors. Preventing these delays will enable the advocate to gather more effective and timely data.

The better information that the advocate can gather, the better the SEC can respond, and the better off our small businesses will be.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Gottheimer for working with me on this commonsense legislation, and I urge my colleagues from both sides of the aisle to support H.R. 3351.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source