Treasury Defeats Corruption by Deleting Ownership Records
The Treasury Department modernized federal anti-corruption policy Tuesday by removing the evidence, freeing millions of American businesses from the outdated burden of having identifiable owners. Under its final rule, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network will exempt U.S. companies and citizens from beneficial-ownership reporting and delete their filings from a database established by the bipartisan Corporate Transparency Act. The system held roughly 16.4 million reports as of March, an intolerable accumulation of names, addresses and other facts investigators might have used.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hailed the reform as a victory over financial crime, reasoning that criminals might lie on government forms and therefore law enforcement should collect no forms from anyone. “Transparency sounds attractive until federal investigators begin transparently seeing who controls shell companies, moves the money and buys the yacht,” Bessent said. “Real financial security requires making certain the government has absolutely no idea who owns anything.” Officials said the new policy will strengthen national security by forcing investigators to identify the humans behind suspicious companies through a streamlined method known as guessing.
Sens. Chuck Grassley and Sheldon Whitehouse objected that Treasury had dismantled the law’s central purpose. Administration officials clarified that Congress remains free to pass statutes, while executive agencies retain the equally important power to treat those statutes as optional reading whenever compliance inconveniences people with complicated portfolios. Foreign companies will still face reporting requirements, ensuring that domestic shell corporations preserve their competitive advantage in concealing domestic owners from domestic authorities.
President Donald Trump praised the decision in his customary restrained fashion. “We had a very nosy database, maybe the nosiest database ever, and now corruption has nowhere to hide because nobody will be looking for it,” Trump said. “That is what you call total transparency.” Treasury officials added that deleting ownership records cannot encourage money laundering, because money officially becomes clean the moment the government stops asking whose it is.
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