What Many Small Businesses Call Their Biggest Challenge

COMMENTARY Government Regulation

What Many Small Businesses Call Their Biggest Challenge

Mar 7, 2016 1 min read
COMMENTARY BY

Former Research Coordinator

Patrick Tyrrell was a Research Coordinator in The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.

The 2015 Small Business Credit Survey Report on Employer Firms, released March 3 by seven Federal Reserve Banks, contains disturbing news.

Twenty-two percent of small businesses with annual revenues over $10 million identified compliance with government regulations as the biggest challenge they faced over the past 12 months. That’s up from only four percent in a similar but smaller survey last year.

Participants in the 2015 survey ranked government regulations as more problematic than credit availability, cash flow, the cost of running a business, taxes, and other problems.

For an overview of how government regulations continue to climb, see The Heritage Foundation’s “Red Tape Rising: Six Years of Escalating Regulation Under Obama.”

This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal