Treasury Opens Doors To Financial Crimes, As Long As Said Crimes Are Committed By United States Citizens

Treasury will no longer require corporations to state who the beneficial owners are. It is a law passed by Congress, but they're just going to ignore it. 

In order to combat money laundering, terrorist funding, and other types of financial crimes, the United States passed the Corporate Transparency Act. This act worked its way through Congress during the first Trump Administration and finally became law in 2021. It requires that corporate beneficiaries are known to the Department of Treasury. 

Today, Treasury reported it will not enforce the ownership reporting requirement for United States corporations; only for foreign beneficiaries. 

Below, read from the Corporate Transparency Act itself for the reason why the act exists in the first place:

"Criminals have exploited State formation procedures to conceal their identities when forming corporations or limited liability companies in the United States, and have then used the newly created entities to commit crimes affecting interstate and international commerce such as terrorism, proliferation financing, drug and human trafficking, money laundering, tax evasion, counterfeiting, piracy, securities fraud, financial fraud, and acts of foreign corruption.

"Law enforcement efforts to investigate corporations and limited liability companies suspected of committing crimes have been impeded by the lack of available beneficial ownership information, as documented in reports and testimony by officials from the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Treasury, and the Government Accountability Office, and others.

"In July 2006, the leading international antimoney laundering standard-setting body, the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (in this section referred to as the “FATF”), of which the United States is a member, issued a report that criticizes the United States for failing to comply with a FATF standard on the need to collect beneficial ownership information and urged the United States to correct this deficiency by July 2008. In December 2016, FATF issued another evaluation of the United States, which found that little progress has been made over the last ten years to address this problem. It identified the “lack of timely access to adequate, accurate and current beneficial ownership information” as a fundamental gap in United States efforts to combat money laundering and terrorist finance."

Treasury's failure to enforce a law that was passed to protect Americans and national security will make every one of us and our nation less safe.  I cannot think of any good reasons to suspend the enforcement of this law.

Text - H.R.2513 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): Corporate Transparency Act of 2019 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
Treasury Department Announces Suspension of Enforcement of Corporate Transparency Act Against U.S. Citizens and Domestic Reporting Companies | U.S. Department of the Treasury