Here’s how the game works. You want to open a bank account, you hand over your Social Security number, two forms of ID, a utility bill, and your firstborn. You want to set up an anonymous shell company to wash money through American real estate? Used to be you needed less paperwork than a library card. That’s not me being colorful. Ian Gary, who runs the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, said exactly that: it takes more information to get a library card in all 50 states than it does to set up an anonymous shell company.
Congress finally did something about it. The Corporate Transparency Act, passed in 2021 with bipartisan support, required companies to tell the government who actually owns them. Not the public. Not your competitors. Just FinCEN, the financial crimes unit at Treasury. The whole point was to stop drug cartels, human traffickers, and tax cheats from hiding behind Delaware LLCs.
And on March 2, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent walked out and killed it.
Pixabay / PexelsNo enforcement. No fines. No penalties. If you’re a U.S. company and you don’t want to tell the government who your real owners are, congratulations. You don’t have to. Bessent called it “part of President Trump’s bold agenda to unleash American prosperity by reining in burdensome regulations.”
Burdensome. You know what’s burdensome? Trying to track fentanyl money when the government just turned off the only database that would have shown you where it went.
Trump posted on Truth Social that the rule was “an absolute disaster for Small Businesses Nationwide” and that the “economic menace” of beneficial owner reporting “will soon be no more.” Economic menace. Reporting who owns your company. That’s the menace. Not the cartels. Not the oligarchs parking stolen money in