Not an Accident

Following an expose from the ICIJ, a law was passed by Congress to require greater transparency in corporate registration.

Rather unsurprisingly, the release of the database has been repeatedly delayed.  This is not a surprise.  The powers that be have no interest in outing their tax-dodging corrupt patrons, so they are slow walking this.

Systemic corruption much?

A key U.S. reform designed to halt anonymous companies hiding illicit activities and funds remains stalled in the U.S. Treasury Department two years after the FinCEN Files, a global money laundering probe led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, spurred calls for strengthened safeguards.

Experts say the Treasury Department is badly behind schedule in implementing the law mandating the government to collect ownership data from companies operating in the United States. Transparency advocates who cheered the new law now worry that the delays are so severe that the all-important registry could remain unfinished by the next presidential election, and that a new administration might have less interest in implementing and defending the law.

“There is a lot of anxiety that the Biden administration will take the whole four years to finalize the rules setting up the beneficial ownership registry,” Elise Bean, an anti-corruption expert and former chief counsel of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said. “It is hard to understand what is taking so long.”

………

In September of 2020, ICIJ, BuzzFeed News and more than 100 media outlets published the FinCEN Files, exposing more than $2 trillion worth of suspicious transactions flowing through the global financial system that U.S.-based banks that did little to stop. The project was named after the Treasury Department’s financial crime fighting office, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN.

Experts said the creation of a registry of company owners was key to curbing the sort of financial secrecy exposed by the FinCEN Files and other ICIJ investigations. Forcing company owners to identify themselves would help stem flows of dirty money through the U.S. financial system, which advocates have consistently flagged as notoriously opaque and vulnerable to money laundering.

Citing public outcry following the FinCEN Files’ release, U.S. lawmakers advanced a landmark anti-money-laundering bill called the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, which included the Corporate Transparency Act. The law tasked FinCEN with setting up the new database and writing the detailed regulations that would undergird the system.

Those rules were supposed to be finished months ago, but so far, experts say, FinCEN has only proposed one of the three sets of rules needed to launch the ownership database. And even this first set — governing how the data will be collected and who must report company ownership — hasn’t been finalized, experts told ICIJ.

I am not sure if this corruption at the Presidential appointee level, or if it is at the civil service level, where decades free market absolutism has poisoned the culture, but this is clearly the result of a concerted to prevent this database from ever seeing the light of day.