The Trump administration has gutted a key anti-corruption tool meant to combat illicit finance through opaque shell companies. The rollback protects donors who use shell companies to conceal their identities or make illegal political contributions. Last Friday, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)—a Treasury Department office—issued an interim final rule scaling back the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), a 2021 law designed to force companies to report the people behind them, also known as their “beneficial owners,” to the government. Under the rollback, only foreign companies doing business in the U.S. will have to comply, while domestic companies will get a free pass.
Passed on a bipartisan basis as part of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, the CTA was an attempt to pierce the veil of secrecy that surrounds shell companies such as LLCs that exist only on paper in order to obscure the flow of funds. The law took effect last year, forcing companies to report their owners’ personal information, but a federal court in Texas issued a nationwide injunction in December that halted its enforcement and compliance dates. Now, the Trump administration finished the job by effectively gutting it. The Treasury Department claims that the move was necessary to protect small businesses from having to comply with burdensome reporting requirements.
Without ownership data, law enforcement can’t spot if an unknown LLC dropping millions into a super PAC is legit or a straw donor masking banned contributors like foreign firms or government contractors.
On Wednesday, last week, the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ola Olukoyede, disclosed that it had uncovered a religious sect in Nigeria involved in money laundering for terrorists.
An analysis of more than 1,600 ‘anti-money laundering (AML) events’ recorded across the UK in the last decade shows money laundering is the most prevalent issue (27.5%), a new report has revealed.
A U.S. appeals court rejected a Securities and Exchange Commission rule intended to give investors more transparency into private funds, but which the nearly $27 trillion industry said threatened to
In the wake of the pandemic, tax evasion in the VAT is up in Europe, but down drastically in Greece. And every reduction in tax evasion achieved on a permanent basis paves the way for new -permanent-