Treasury Deletes Corporate Transparency Act Database

By Tammy-Jo Pritchett · August 12, 2026

Opinion

So I’ve been reading up on this, and I have some questions for the manager.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, walked out on Tuesday and announced that American companies don’t have to tell the government who their real owners are anymore. Not only that. They’re taking the database they already built, the one with all the ownership information that was already collected, and they’re deleting it. Wiping it. Gone. Like your kid’s homework when the dog gets hungry.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, walked out on Tuesday and announced the deletion of the database.

Let me walk you through what happened here, because I did my own research and I’m not getting my news from a chyron.

Back in 2021, Congress passed something called the Corporate Transparency Act. It was a bipartisan law. Republicans and Democrats both voted for it. The idea was simple: if you own a company, you have to tell the government who you are. Not the public. Not your neighbors. Just law enforcement and national security agencies. Because before this law, the United States was one of the only major countries on Earth where you could set up a shell company and nobody, not even the FBI, could find out who was behind it.

That’s not me being dramatic. That’s from the Holland & Knight law firm’s own analysis. Anonymous shell companies. Money laundering. Terrorist financing. Tax fraud. That’s what this law was built to stop. And it worked the way a lot of common-sense rules work: quietly, in the background, without bothering anybody who was just running a legitimate business.

The U.S. Treasury Department is the agency managing the deletion of the database.

Now Bessent says the reporting requirement was “burdensome.” Burdensome. You know what’s burdensome? Filling out a FAFSA. Filing your taxes. Getting a passport for a nine-year-old. A form that asks who owns your LLC is burdensome? I fill out more paperwork to register my kid for travel soccer.

And here’s the part that really got me going in the group chat. The Government Accountability Office, which is about as exciting as it sounds, put out a report in May saying that the exemptions FinCEN already put in place back in March eliminated more than 99 percent of the companies that were supposed to report. Ninety-nine percent. So the rule that was left was already a ghost. And now they’re finishing the job and torching whatever data they managed to collect before the gutting started.

Foreign companies still have to report their foreign owners. Great. Wonderful. So the American shell company is back on the menu, but at least we’ll know who owns the Cayman Islands LLC. That’s like locking the back door and leaving the front one wide open with a welcome mat.

The Corporate Transparency Act database is being deleted by the Treasury Department.

There are bills in Congress right now, one in the House and one in the Senate, that would turn this into permanent law. Senator Mike Lee from Utah and Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana sponsored the Senate version. They call it protecting small businesses from “intrusive overregulation.” I call it giving every crook with a filing fee a fresh start.

Here’s what I want to know, and I want somebody to look me in the eye when they answer: who exactly was complaining about this? Because I know a lot of small business owners. I’m related to several. Not one of them has ever come to me red-faced at a barbecue saying, “I am furious that I had to tell FinCEN who owns my roofing company.” Not one. But somebody was complaining. Somebody with a lobbyist. Somebody who really, really prefers not to have their name attached to the things they own.

They think we’re too dumb to notice the difference between cutting red tape and cutting the lights on the whole building. We’re not.

Sources