Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Addressing the House of Commons on March 6, 2024, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt provided a budget aimed at driving long-term growth by reducing inflation and debt and growing the economy with permanent cuts in taxation. Unfortunately, these tax cuts largely exclude business owners, according to Scott Dawson, head of sales and strategic partnerships at DECTA.
"Business leaders will certainly feel underwhelmed by the Chancellor's UK Spring Budget announcements," he said, adding that these election-year efforts by the Conservative party will only help wealthy people who own multiple homes. "What we needed," he added, "were robust measures, tax relief and incentives that secure UK businesses prospects in the long term. The small gestures that were made barely promise to do this in the short term."
Dawson further noted that while he supports measures to raise the £85,000 VAT threshold, sweeping tax cuts that directly help businesses and a cash stimulus for the general public would help UK businesses even more. Politicians describe business as a backbone of the economy but hinder most enterprises from reaching their full potential, he added.
"Elections polls have shown that that the majority of UK businesses now [favor] a [Labor] government and today's announcements are unlikely to shift that balance significantly," Dawson said. "UK businesses need to stop looking to a party with one foot out the door for answers and seriously examine if they have what it takes to survive a difficult economic period."
In the United States, legal analysts have criticized the CFPB's authority and overreach, citing punitive measures targeting financial service providers, most recently with guidance issued Feb. 29, 2024, designed to curtail fraudulent comparison shopping practices.
CFPB Director Rohit Chopra stated that comparison-shopping tools tied to kickbacks are illegal and need to be stopped. Lead generators, for example, that provide comparative tools without disclosing their own potential financial benefits, are committing fraud, he stated.
"Americans turn to online comparison tools to find the credit card with the lowest interest rates or best rewards," he said. "The CFPB is working to ensure that digital advertisements for financial products are not disguised as unbiased and objective advice."
Chopra acknowledged that properly implemented comparison-shopping tools can help consumers evaluate and identify financial products, especially credit cards and mortgages, but he suggested that some operators manipulate these tools by skewing data displayed to shoppers.
Troutman Pepper, a national law firm, pointed out that compensating service providers is a common practice, and 2023 guidance from the FTC already restricts misrepresentations and failures to disclose financial relationships between product providers and creditors.
In a Feb. 29, 2024 post, "CFPB Warns Digital Comparison-Shopping Operators and Lead Generators That Steering Consumers Could Violate the CFPA, But Fails to Discuss Disclosures Commonly Used in the Industry," attorneys Mark Furletti, Stephanie Jackman, James Kim, Chris Willis, Josh McBeain and Glen Trudel challenged the ruling.
"The CFPB's circular completely ignores the content of disclosures to consumers (and the guidance from the FTC), and instead focuses only on whether there is compensation paid to the operator of the comparison-shopping site," the authors wrote. "By failing to address this issue, the CFPB has, possibly intentionally, injected uncertainty into this important issue for e-commerce." 
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