#legal
Legal considerations for business finance and accounting compliance
Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act requires a written policy, notice, and signed consent before any fingerprint, palm-vein, or facial-recognition time clock scans an employee, with damages of $1,000–$5,000 per violation and similar consent rules now spreading to Texas, Washington, and roughly twenty other states.
California's SB 648 takes effect January 1, 2026, giving the Labor Commissioner direct authority to fine employers $250 to $1,000 per violation for deducting credit card processing fees from employee tips, a practice already banned under Labor Code Section 351.
Custom guitar luthiers should book customer deposits as a liability (deferred revenue) until delivery, track each tonewood set's acquisition cost and CITES paperwork individually rather than by replacement value, and use job-based WIP tracking to compare actual labor hours against a typical 40-80 hour build estimate.
The DOL's 2024 Retirement Security Rule was formally vacated in March 2026, reverting fiduciary status for 401(k) rollover advice to the 1975 five-part test — here's what plan sponsors and savers should ask advisors now.
As of January 1, 2026, twenty states have comprehensive data privacy laws, but coverage of employee HR records varies sharply — California extends full consumer rights to employees while Colorado and Virginia exempt employment records except for a new Colorado biometric-data carve-out effective July 1, 2025.
The FTC's 2026 "double disclosure" rule requires sponsored posts to separately disclose AI involvement in addition to paid-partnership status, with penalties up to $53,088 per non-compliant post.
A virtual medical scribe agency needs a signed Business Associate Agreement before billing a single shift, and its pricing model — hourly, monthly subscription, or per-encounter — determines when revenue should be recognized and how the chart of accounts should be structured.
A Texas federal court vacated FinCEN's Residential Real Estate Rule on March 19, 2026, eighteen days after it took effect, ending the mandatory reporting requirement for all-cash LLC and trust property purchases while FinCEN appeals to the Fifth Circuit.
Retainers are deferred revenue or client trust — track per case, job-cost hours, mileage, advances and subcontractors, classify investigators on control, and run on realization and recovered-expense recovery.
Program-related investments let a private foundation count loans, equity stakes, or guarantees toward its mandatory 5% annual payout, then reclaim the capital as it's repaid, but PRIs to non-charitable recipients trigger IRS expenditure-responsibility rules with a 20% excise tax and personal manager penalties for noncompliance.
Virginia's 2026 employment law changes require salary ranges in job postings, extend Human Rights Act coverage to employers with five or more employees, void non-competes lacking a severance clause, and lower the RetirePath Virginia auto-IRA threshold to five employees, with penalties reaching $10,000 per violation.
Business valuation in divorce hinges on separating enterprise goodwill from personal goodwill and active from passive appreciation, using ASA/ABV/CVA-credentialed methods like income, market, and asset approaches.
