Voluntary filings for beneficial ownership information (BOI) keep rolling in even as the federal government defends challenges against the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), the anti-money-laundering law authorizing the rule.

According to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), nearly 4.5 million filings were made between Dec. 3 and January 16.

Filings continue at a steady pace in 2025. About 800,000 were made from Jan. 2 through Jan. 16, which a FinCEN spokesperson said matched the pace of filings between last summer and November, when applications began spiking. By Jan. 16, the BOI report website had received more than 14.5 million filings since its January 2024 launch.

“Let’s just file it.” Sean Flynn has helped businesses file their BOI reports with SingleFile, a software compliance company he cofounded and where he is chief legal officer. Many clients filed their reports even after the injunction made it voluntary, he told CFO Brew. They might have spent months analyzing who controls and/or owns what percentage of all the entities under their business, only for the injunction to make it voluntary (for now).

For more on the companies still filing BOIs, click here.—GD

As inflation slows and the labor market tightens, employees will see a third consecutive year of diminishing pay increases, while fewer companies plan on offering raises at all, according to a Gartner survey of 300 CFOs and finance leaders published on Monday.

Randeep Rathindran, a VP of research in Gartner’s finance practice, said in a press release that the ever-smaller increases reflect declines in inflation and quitting.

Since late 2022, a time of high turnover and inflation, the number of respondents planning to increase pay has fallen steadily. By last October, the share of CFOs and finance leaders in the Gartner survey planning to raise salaries fell to 61%, down from 86% in 2022.

Over the same period, the share planning a “nominal change,” i.e., no raise, increased from just 9% in 2023 to 37% for 2025. The share of CFOs who said they plan to decrease wages has remained roughly flat, in the low single digits.

But. CFOs turning down the dial on raises should do so with a clear sense of the trade-offs, Rathindran said.

Click here for more on what CFOs have planned for raises this year.—GD

CohnReznick is likely to become the latest large US accounting firm to sell a majority stake in itself to private equity, according to the Wall Street Journal. Insiders told the Journal that CohnReznick, the nation’s sixteenth largest accounting firm by revenue, is in advanced talks with British PE firm Apax Partners. The deal “could be announced in the coming weeks,” the newspaper reported.

CohnReznick, a New York-based audit and consulting firm, had revenue of more than $1 billion in 2023 and would be valued at around $2 billion.

Apax is a newcomer to the accounting world, but CohnReznick won’t be its first foray: After years of keeping an eye on the accounting and advisory field, it bought the professional services branch of UK firm Evelyn Partners in November 2024.

Crumpets, scones, and…private equity? Though it may seem unusual for a UK fund to buy a US firm, it’s actually a new manifestation of a trend that’s happening on both sides of the pond. British accounting firms are also looking to PE for capital.

Keep reading here.—CV