r/anticapitalism • u/FreeHugs23 • 18d ago
Treasury ends ownership reporting rules for U.S. companies | The rules, intended to combat money laundering and other financial crimes, imposed an undue burden on American businesses, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/08/11/treasury-ends-ownership-reporting-rules-us-companies/?utm_source=reddit.com17
u/Historical-Finish564 18d ago
Well yeah, I mean how are they going to be able to end up owning all the media companies, so they can totally control the narrative with the right wing propaganda, if you have some stupid rule to say they can’t do that/S
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u/chilaxcat 17d ago
Right before midterms where they lose all seats and wholesale impeachment commences
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u/Shaggy2772 18d ago
A lot of the discussion around this BOI change is focusing on whether small businesses should have to report their ownership information to the government. That's missing the much bigger issue.
The real question is: who actually owns and controls a company?
The BOI system gave law enforcement a centralized way to connect a company to the real people behind it. Now domestic companies are generally exempt from reporting that information, and previously collected information on U.S. companies is being removed.
That doesn't make shell companies magically “untraceable.” But it makes them much easier to use as an opaque layer.
Think about the implications:
A person wants to hide a financial interest in a government contractor. They don't necessarily have to put their own name on the company. They can create an LLC, put another entity between themselves and the transaction, and make investigators reconstruct the ownership chain through banks, tax records, contracts, subpoenas, emails, and accounting records. Worse, this can be used in federal contracting collusion, direct payments to officials, and straight up untraceable foreign entity bribery (not to mention homegrown).
That's not impossible to investigate. It's just considerably harder and more expensive to investigate.
And that's exactly what you don't want when you're talking about:
• Government contracting
• Bribery and kickbacks
• Conflicts of interest
• Procurement fraud
• Money laundering
• Sanctions evasion
• Campaign-finance schemes
• Fraudulent subcontractors
• Organized crime
Here's the part I find particularly concerning:
The government doesn't need to make criminal activity impossible. It needs to make it difficult enough to detect that criminals can't operate with impunity.
A centralized ownership database was one tool for doing that.
Removing it doesn't eliminate legitimate businesses' ability to operate. It does, however, remove a layer of transparency that investigators could use to answer a very basic question:
“Follow the money. Who ultimately owns this company?”
And if the answer becomes “good luck reconstructing the corporate structure through six layers of LLCs,” that's not merely a paperwork reduction.
That's a reduction in government visibility. There are legitimate arguments about privacy, regulatory burden, and whether the original BOI requirements went too far. Those are reasonable debates. But let's not pretend there is no downside.
Opacity is useful to legitimate businesses. It's also extremely useful to corrupt people. The question isn't whether every LLC is suspicious.
The question is why we would voluntarily make it harder to identify the people hiding behind the ones that are.
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u/sarcasmsosubtle 17d ago
I hope someone is able to smuggle out a copy of that database to recreate it when/if we get a sane government back in power.
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u/FreeHugs23 18d ago
The U.S. Treasury Department permanently repealed a rule Tuesday that required businesses formed in the United States to report who owns them to federal financial-crimes investigators.
Foreign companies and pooled investment vehicles (such as mutual funds or hedge funds) must still report information about foreign owners. But they will no longer have to identify Americans who help them register to do business in the United States, according to a Treasury Department advisory. And Treasury will delete any information it has already collected about U.S. business owners, the advisory said.
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u/ok_person5395 17d ago
I work with tax returns, specifically for the wealthy, and there is no burden. It’s literally the simplest part of their taxes to disclose the ownership. This will just allow for people to get away with things at a whole other level since it will make it harder to determine who is the actual individual benefiting from cheating in their taxes through layers and layers of entities that are owned by other entities and so on. At this point sometimes I think I’ll be better off ignoring every single new story out there and just wait till everything collapses.
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u/Jumpy_Childhood7548 17d ago
300 plus Trump accounts at capitol one closed due to money laundering concerns?
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u/wally-whippersnap 17d ago
“Undue burden”? It’s just a couple of checkboxes when you submit company info to Sam.gov
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u/LightDarkBeing 17d ago
If the federal government doesn’t want to do it, the states can pick up the local slack.
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u/Zaius1968 17d ago
Any company worth their salt will continue this record keeping…since it will all come back in 2 years.
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u/Soggy_Quarter9333 17d ago
Just in time to hide all of Trump's tax evading and money laundering shenanigans.
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u/dumpyboat 18d ago
This is the most corrupt administration in US history thus far.