Nina Olsen, in case you didn’t know, is the National Taxpayer Advocate. A few years ago, when she named the tax gap as the top taxpayer challenge for fiscal 2004 and simultaneously nailed Schedule C filers as an entire class of tax cheats, she seemed like Microbusiness Public Enemy #1.

This year, she is letting everybody know that those new 1099 reporting requirements are absurd. So, now, it’s more like We Love Nina, right?

Besides taxes, there’s more political gyrations around what Congress can and should be and will do for small businesses and whether, as usual, all of that will turn out to be useless for microbusinesses.

There’s new numbers out this week, as well, and another edition of Policy Matters.

For more information:

• FY2010 National Taxpayer Advocate Report To Congress (PDF)
• Senators Reid, Landrieu Join SBA Administrator Mills To Discuss Support for Small Business
• U.S. Census Bureau: Survey of Business Owners
• Microbusiness Conversations

Take this debacle with the nomination of Dr. Winslow Sargeant. Personally, given that it is not required by statute for the Chief Counsel of the SBA Office of Advocacy to be a lawyer, Senator Olympia Snowe’s intransigence about it strikes me as being a bit unreasonable … even irrational.

-ahem-

Do you really have to be a lawyer in order to go to bat for small businesses that are regularly browbeaten by federal regulations? I wouldn’t have thought so, not when there are attorneys on staff at Advocacy and when the real experts on the subject are small business owners on those Advocacy panels I keep hearing about.

On the Senate floor, Senator Mary Landrieu mentioned that when the economy is in the sort of shambles it’s in right now, this is not the time to withhold any sort of resource for small businesses — including their very own advocate within the federal government.

She’s right. And, just between us, I sure hope they get this resolved soon!

So, in other news … anybody taking bets on whether the federal budget will get cobbled together, passed by both the House and the Senate, and all 12 bills signed into law before the close of the fiscal year on September 30th?

Nah, I didn’t think so.

For more information:

• Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
• Status of Fiscal 2011 Appropriations Bills (THOMAS)
• SBA Office of Advocacy

It was supposed to be an upgrade, really.

The original plan was to merge this podcast into a new Blog Talk Radio program called Microbusiness Conversations. The format of the show would be an initial ten minutes of microbusiness news followed by a twenty minute conversation with the week’s guest.

What I found out was that (a) this podcast really does not lend itself to that sort of format and (b) if I did that, I would leave my regular podcast listeners hanging. There was no convenient way to transfer you guys over to BTR.

So, here I am and I apologize for going AWOL for a couple of weeks.

As for this week’s news, don’t let the title fool you. The BIG story this week is all about data. There were two separate data releases from Advocacy and Census and both contained their share of surprises.

(If you want details, you can head on over the The Journal Blog and check out last week’s posts.)

And, in addition to all that, we’re back with this week’s Policy Matters.

For more information:

• Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
• SBA Office of Advocacy
• U.S. Census Bureau Nonemployer Statistics

Are you excited?

Last week, President Obama signed the relevant proclamation, which proclaimed, in part:

In this year’s State of the Union address, I proposed creating a $30 billion lending fund to help increase the flow of credit to small businesses, and I call on the Congress to pass this legislation quickly. My Administration is also working to extend and enhance Small Business Administration programs that have helped small business owners acquire loans and hire workers.

This week, we celebrate the role of entrepreneurs and small businesses in our national life. They are the engine of our prosperity and a proud reflection of our character. A healthy small business sector will give us vibrant communities, cutting-edge technology, and an American economy that can compete and win in the 21st century.

Because never let it be said that a president lost an opportunity to pat himself on the back — presumably because nobody else ever wants to do it, right?

So, this week’s news includes the latest effort to spur small business lending (likely to be fairly useless for most microbusinesses) and the latest dynamic jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing that small businesses — including microbusiness employers — really were creating jobs during the third quarter of 2009, just like everybody said they wanted them to.

All this and another Policy Matters column, too.

For more information:

• House Committee on Financial Services
• Bureau of Labor Statistics

Last week, members of both the House and Senate Small Business Committees got an opportunity to get a little bit clued in to how microbusinesses do business now, and how larger small businesses hope to do business in the future — that is, using technology to get very lean and efficient.

It’ll be interesting, because some of those larger small businesses will shrink down to micro-size when the discover they can run their businesses with far fewer personnel and far larger profit margins.

Others will chose to either stay their medium size or maybe even grow larger and graduate into the large firm category, if they can.

I have a feeling that the firm size class numbers — due out for 2007 next month — will be very interesting to watch over the next few years.

For more information:

• House Committee on Small Business
• Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
• SBA Office of Advocacy

That’s a fairly large chunk of the labor market. All things considered, you wouldn’t think anybody would have to suggest that some things need to be done about/for them. Except that the unimaginative public servants involved can’t seem to think of anything to do for the independent workforce except to suggest to them that they’d be better off if they got “real jobs.”

Well, either that or start “real businesses.” It really is enough to make you want to scream.

I hope somebody takes it into their head to track the independent workforce, to see if it starts to grow. It seems to me that it should already have grown significant, given the behavior of the nonemployer business population over the last decade. (It may even be reasonable to use one as a surrogate for the other.) That will at least give us a few ideas about growth and economic impact.

Also in this week’s microbusiness news, we have universal broadband access and small business exporting. And, as always, another Policy Matters column.

For further information:

• The Freelancer’s Union
• Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
• House Committee on Small Business

Of course, that might have had something to do with all that snow that got dumped onto the nation’s capital earlier this year. As a resident of the Catskill Mountains, it’s tough for me to sympathize (”The government is a bunch of weather wimps!” chortled my 15-year-old daughter) but I try very hard not to pass judgment.

They live in Virginia. Of course they’re weather wimps.

Be that as it may, it seems as if the House and Senate Small Business Committees are getting it into gear at long last. And not a moment too soon, either; as you’ll see, all the recent economic good news is not translating into either happier consumers spending more money or happier small business owners restocking their shelves.

Recovery is turning out to be slower than slow on Main Street. People in Congress had better start acting like they care about that or they’re going to pay the price in November.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned, guys and gals. It’s still the economy, stupid.

For more information:

• House Committee on Small Business
• Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
• The Conference Board
• National Federation of Independent Business
• U.S. Department of Commerce
• U.S. Department of Labor

Naturally, since April 15th was last week, you knew there was going to be something about everybody’s least favorite civic chore in the week’s microbusiness news, didn’t you?

I didn’t have the space in the Microbusiness News Briefs to do last week’s House Small Business Committee hearing full justice, to own the truth. Everything from Vern Buchanan’s concern about those unfortunate souls earning in excess of $250,000 in annual adjusted income to Roscoe Bartlett’s rather bizarre theory that taxing business income hurts poor people was on display.

You really just can’t make this stuff up.

That’s one of my ongoing frustrations, the difficulty in covering an event that has all kinds of complex background information attached to it. Inevitably, you have to leave things out, whether you want to or not.

(That’s also what makes The MicroEnterprise Journal a much more valuable source of information when it comes to delivering the microbusiness news.)

All of that said, the health care haggling that took over last week’s hearing on small business and taxes before the House Small Business Committee was worth the attention it got. Clearly, Congressional Republicans are on the warpath, managing to mar even the legendary bipartisan harmony on this Committee.

Also this week, an interesting hearing on minority-owned firms and access to capital (or lack thereof) and, as always, this week’s Policy Matters column.

For more information:

• House Committee on Small Business
• Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship

If you’re wondering if I may have filled the bong a little too early this morning, that greeting will make sense to you after you hear this week’s Policy Matters column.

As for the news, it’s always interesting to me when Congress slaps a “small business” label on some piece of legislation that is useless for nine out of ten small businesses in the country. When giant agri-business corporations do that, they get in trouble with people yelling things like “truth in labeling!”

There is no truth in labeling in either politics or public policy. It’s very sad.

We have a summary of economic data, with the promise of an update in the near future. And Microloan Intermediaries and Women’s Business Centers are having a tough time with funding but, fortunately for them, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has donned her red cape and S tee shirt, and leaps to the rescue.

That’s quite an image, actually, but of course that’s all metaphorically speaking.

For more information:

• House Committee on Ways and Means
• Bureau of Labor Statistics
• National Federation of Independent Business
• The Conference Board
• Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship

There are a few issues, not really very many. There’s taxes and regulations and federal procurement and technology-related stuff and access to capital.

These issues never actually go away. The just get recycled every year.

Lawmakers never seem able to solve them or even to make a significant dent in solving them. Well, no, I take that back. President Bush and former Advocacy Chief Counsel made a healthy dent in Regulatory Flexibility Act enforcement with Executive Order 13272.

Except, of course, that whenever Congress makes widespread changes to the RFA or to the federal regulatory landscape, that makes another round of RFA compliance training that Advocacy will have to do.

The other problems just seem intransigent, and none moreso than small businesses and federal procurement. It issue and its component parts never change and Congress seems wholly incapable of coming up with effective solutions to those problems.

Federal procurement is on the docket today, along with a follow-up on the nomination of Dr. Winslow Sargeant for Advocacy Chief Counsel and research on retirement savings behavior among small business owners and employees.

And, as always, my weekly Policy Matters column, in which I contemplate the symptoms of insanity sometimes displayed by members of Congress.

For more information:

• House Committee on Small Business
• Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
• SBA Office of Advocacy