President Donald Trump signed a bill containing $900 billion in pandemic relief, the White House said, triggering the flow of aid to individuals and businesses and averting the risk of a partial government shutdown on Tuesday.
In addition to aid to stem the economic effects of the pandemic, the legislation Congress passed Monday also includes $1.4 trillion in government spending to fund federal agencies through the end of the fiscal year in September. The government had been operating on temporary spending authority that expires after the end of the day Monday.
Tom Neill was managing shareholder of Finney, Neill & Co. His 40-plus years in public accounting primarily focused on assurance and attest services as well as financial statement preparation and business consulting experience in a large variety of industries. His experience also includes working with business and individual tax matters. He also teaches continuing education courses in regulatory ethics.
He is a member of the AICPA's National Pipeline Advisory Group; current chair of the AICPA Uniform Accountancy Act Committee; and a member of the NASBA Peer Review Compliance Committee. He spent nine years on the Washington State Board of Accountancy (including two years as board chair); and is a past-member of the NASBA Ethics and Professional Issues Committee, a past member of the AICPA Professional Ethics Executive Committee, and past president of the Washington Society of CPAs. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1980 and received his CPA license in 1983.
Denise M. Tyson is the CEO and founder of Schaefer City Technologies. Tyson is a financial and operational management executive with extensive experience in the insurance industry, including insurtech startups, mergers/acquisitions, reorganizations, and financially challenging situations. She has held C-level positions with multiple insurance companies since 2000. She was the founder of Simplicity, Inc. an insurtech startup focused on pay-as-you-go personal auto insurance; the president of Go Insurance Company, part of a fully integrated insurtech organization; and the first EVP and CFO of Doma (fka States Title, Inc.) an insurtech company transforming the title industry.
Tyson started her finance and accounting career in public accounting in New York City working for KPMG and went on to work with PwC in Los Angeles as a Senior Manager leading their Financial Services team before launching into the insurance and insurtech industries. Tyson is a Certified Public Accountant. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Accountancy from Villanova University and an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Nurasyl Serik is the Co-Founder & CEO at Remofirst, a startup transforming global payroll and compliance for remote teams, with a mission to simplify and streamline the future of work.
The combined $2.3 trillion package was the product of intense negotiations, from which Trump was largely absent until he surprised lawmakers of both parties by demanding bigger stimulus payments for individuals after the bill was already passed.
Trump said in the statement announcing the signing that the GOP Senate had agreed to vote on increasing the $600 individual payments and two other, unrelated matters dealing with social media and his unfounded allegations of voter fraud.
His delay in signing it means those aid payments will likely be later than Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had promised and may cut a week from the supplemental unemployment benefits that were part of the package and scheduled to end in March.
The virus relief package will likely be the last major legislation signed by Trump, whose re-election hopes were dashed in large part due to his handling of the pandemic.
President-elect Joe Biden has said he will push for even more stimulus after taking office early next year, but it remains unclear whether Republicans in Congress would go along. Control of the Senate will be determined by the outcome of two runoff elections in Georgia on Jan 5.
Lawmakers approved the government funding and additional relief at the last possible moment before they were set to leave Washington for a year-end break. Business leaders have called on Congress to pass more stimulus for months, saying that restaurants, theaters, mom-and-pop stores and airlines were being decimated by closures and restrictions as Covid-19 cases spiked in the U.S.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a relief deal on Sunday after more than a week of frantic talks sparked by a bipartisan group of senators who drafted their own compromise proposal and urged their leaders to act. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, representing the administration, also was involved in the talks.
Trump surprised even his fellow Republicans on Tuesday by tweeting a video saying that he wanted Congress to increase the size of stimulus payments for individuals to $2,000, from the $600 in the bill Congress passed. He also complained about federal spending on foreign aid and international programs, even though those funds were allocated as part of the bipartisan appropriations process for funding the government.