cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/71226
The Trump administration has finalized a rule that will allow shell companies and other questionable entities to conceal their ownership from federal investigators, in a move that critics say will only further facilitate corruption in the U.S. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network announced on Tuesday that it is ending the regulation that requires companies to…
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He didn’t repeal the law. He repealed an administative rule/regulation (that was never really implemented in the first place).
The law was the NDAA (part of which was the Corporate Transparency Act). Those laws still exist. Ordinarily when a “law” is passed by congress it’s too goddamn vague to implement. So federal agencies start the administrative rulemaking process (which usually takes years to decades) and eventually the appropriate federal agency implements some set of regulations that are the agency’s best effort to implement what they think congress kinda meant with the original law.
In this case, when Biden was president, a rule was passed to implement part of the Corporate Transparency Act that required corporations to report “beneficial owners” to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen). The presumption of this rule was that if you are a beneficial owner of a corporation (but not a big one), you are a criminal or will be, and FinCen needed to know who you are to come bust your ass in the future. The rule was created and implemented fairly quickly in federal rulemaking terms, and like most contentious regs, it was immediately challenged in court, and there were injunctions and reinstatements. and and FinCen was on-again and off-again in telling people to report or not report. It was a shitshow, but moreover, it had a very short compliance deadline, and real teeth in terms of fines, and even by FinCen’s own estimates most “beneficial owners” of corporations had no idea the rule even existed. It was the sort of thing that wouldn’t be hard for the well heeled people to work around, but a pain in the ass for ordinary small corporations. It was feel-good legislation that wouldn’t have done much to stop crime (because we kinda know who the big financial criminals are anyway).