11 ms·

Treasury Announces Suspension of Enforcement of Corporate Transparency Act

78 points by greyface- 2y ago

hello_moto 2y ago
Make big news about Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine but quietly shoot down the regulations that help to protect the people of USA.
- nullc 2y ago
  How does a regulation that creates an invasive federal ownership registry with no meaningful legislative controls on the confidentiality of that information help to protect the public?
  - mixologic 2y ago
    None of that information has any right to confidentiality. It's in the public's interest to know who owns all the fraudlent accounting trick shell companies that exist solely to steal money from "hardworking taxpayers"
    - nullc 2y ago
      Nice presumption of guilt! Do you also think it's the public's right to have a camera in your bathroom because you might be snorting lines of coke in there? :) The beneficial ownership information goes well beyond shell companies doing weird accounting tricks. In particular, it makes it so that it's impossible to own a home without having your name connected to it in a vulnerable databases which criminals will almost certainly be able to access.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > with no meaningful legislative controls on the confidentiality of that information There are strong confidentiality protections around FinCEN’s BOI [1]. (Lol.) [1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-X/part-1010/subpart-J/section-1010.955 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-X/p...
    - nullc 2y ago
      There is significantly less protection than there is even for tax returns, which themselves clearly receive inadequate protection. In particular, blanket permission is given for warrentless access for "law enforcement activity" and undisclosed, target unauthorized access for "compliance with customer due diligence". And overall the restrictions are no stronger than "shall not"-- it's not a felony to violate the rules. In practice it's likely to end up like many states license plate databases where it's easy for sleazy PIs to just bribe access through corrupt LEO or agency desk staff.
  - Geeek 2y ago
    What makes it invasive?
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    Why should any of it be confidential? When you ask our government to grant you special privileges, seems like we should know who's benefiting. Don't like it, don't incorporate and don't enjoy the benefits.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > When you ask our government to grant you special privileges You ask your state to create a corporation. You ask your bank to give it a bank account. The U.S. requires the bank to make you told the U.S. who your beneficial owners are. This isn’t a story about a party granting privileges asking for something in return. And the parties granting those privileges, states and banks, don’t treat them as privileges. Being denied an LLC is extraordinary in every U.S. jurisdiction I know. Being denied a bank account is more common, but still often requires some reason. (Even if it isn’t communicated to the customer.) Note that my argument is narrow: your argument doesn’t hold. I agree with you in these data not deserving confidentiality. But not because incorporation is a privilege, but because there is a social good to making it public and social cost to letting people hide behind fictitious persons. (Where I disagree with the CTA is in making these data only available to law enforcement and the like. FinCEN’s BOI should be public.)
      - alabastervlog 2y ago
        I think the ability to steer a potentially-immortal "legal entity" with capabilities that an individual citizen doesn't have, and that has zero existence outside what what we collectively will into existence via the government, is definitely a privilege. But yes, there's also a strong argument in favor of transparency here because it's a good, pro-social idea. My argument is more a counter to folks crying that their liberty's being stepped on or whatever. Government creates corporations, we can have it do what we want with/to them, some moral argument against our at least being able to know who the hell's benefiting from these creations of our government is somewhere in "not even wrong" territory.
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  - donmcronald 2y ago
    Why shouldn't it be public? We should be allowed to know who owns a company, especially when it's trivial for anyone with a bit of money to set up and tear down a company. If you let that be anonymous, how do you ever hold anyone liable for anything? The customer relationship will be owned by a throw away company and you end up with a buyer beware system where bad actors spin things up and down so quickly that no one can keep track of anything or hold anyone accountable. Think of selling lead paint. If I sell using a company with beneficial ownership known, you can eventually ban me from getting a business registration in that category. If I don't have to disclose that info, I could start a new company every month using different branding and I'd have a dozen "different" products on the market before regulators would be able to unwind the first company. We even have a small preview of that system. Look at the quality, or lack of quality rather, of products bought off of Amazon. It's all the same garbage sold through dozens of different brands. Once it delves into the realm of being illegal, you need to be able to cut it off at the source, aka beneficial owners that are being enriched. Would you argue against knowing the owner for personal bank accounts? I can't walk into a bank and open an account without them knowing exactly who I am and every bank account I have is tied by to the same, real world identity - me. Why should I participate in that invasive system if rich people with shell companies don't have to?
  - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
    The last time I read the Federal Register and SORN documents for the BOI Registry, they were _explicitly_ confidential, limited to government access based on need. There are already legislative oversight controls in place.
throwaway5752 2y ago
For the record https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/Corporate_Transparency_Act.pdf https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/Corporate_... It is the sense of Congress that— (1) more than 2,000,000 corporations and limited liability companies are being formed under the laws of the States each year; (2) most or all States do not require information about the beneficial owners of the corporations, limited liability companies, or other similar entities formed under the laws of the State; (3) malign actors seek to conceal their ownership of corporations, limited liability companies, or other similar entities in the United States to facilitate illicit activity, including money laundering, the financing of terrorism, proliferation financing, serious tax fraud, human and drug trafficking, counterfeiting, piracy, securities fraud, financial fraud, and acts of foreign corruption, harming the national security interests of the United States and allies of the United States; (4) money launderers and others involved in commercial activity intentionally conduct transactions through corporate structures in order to evade detection, and may layer such structures, much like Russian nesting ‘‘Matryoshka’’ dolls, across various secretive jurisdictions such that each time an investigator obtains ownership records for a domestic or foreign entity, the newly identified entity is yet another corporate entity, necessitating a repeat of the same process; (5) Federal legislation providing for the collection of beneficial ownership information for corporations, limited liability companies, or other similar entities formed under the laws of the States is needed to— (A) set a clear, Federal standard for incorporation practices; (B) protect vital Unites States national security interests; (C) protect interstate and foreign commerce; (D) better enable critical national security, intelligence, and law enforcement efforts to counter money laundering, the financing of terrorism, and other illicit activity; and (E) bring the United States into compliance with international anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism standards; (6) beneficial ownership information collected under the amendments made by this title is sensitive information and will be directly available only to authorized government authorities, subject to effective safeguards and controls, to (A) facilitate important national security, intelligence, and law enforcement activities; and (B) confirm beneficial ownership information provided to financial institutions to facilitate the compliance of the financial institutions with anti-money laundering, countering the financing of terrorism, and customer due diligence requirements under applicable law; (7) consistent with applicable law, the Secretary of the Treasury shall— (A) maintain the information described in paragraph (1) in a secure, nonpublic database, using information security methods and techniques that are appropriate to protect nonclassified information systems at the highest security level; and (B) take all steps, including regular auditing, to ensure that government authorities accessing beneficial ownership information do so only for authorized purposes consistent with this title; and (8) in prescribing regulations to provide for the reporting of beneficial ownership information, the Secretary shall, to the greatest extent practicable consistent with the purposes of this title— (A) seek to minimize burdens on reporting companies associated with the collection of beneficial ownership information; (B) provide clarity to reporting companies concerning the identification of their beneficial owners; and (C) collect information in a form and manner that is reasonably designed to generate a database that is highly useful to national security, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies and Federal functional regulators. Today is a massive victory for criminals.
legitster 2y ago
I can understand trying to cut red tape, but this law was intended to fight the money laundering schemes the cartels used to fund their operations. The administration is threatening war with other countries under the guise of illegal drugs, but will roll over if it means they can't cheat on taxes anymore. It's not like they are rolling back the incredibly expensive and privacy invading "Know-Your-Customer" rules across banking as a whole.
- nullc 2y ago
  If a cartel is alone in the forest carrying out no kidnappings, assignations, drug sales, or other physical effects that can be policed by conventional means... does it matter? The beneficial ownership registration was a massive privacy invasion with little hope of providing more than an incidental benefit to the claimed applications. Those cartels would just fail to register ownership or stick patsy proxies in place. > It's not like they are rolling back the incredibly expensive and privacy invading "Know-Your-Customer" rules across banking as a whole. One step at a time.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Your argument is “if cartels are magically not a problem, then they’re not a problem and then this is useless?” I don’t think I understand your comment.
    - nullc 2y ago
      My point is that invading people's privacy on ownership is not a requirement for effective law enforcement against cartels. Cartels may well commit secondary crimes related to money laundering, but the things cartels do that we actually care about are not that and don't require extensive privacy invasion to police. To use a silly example, we could also cut down on cartel activity (and many other serious crimes) if every internet connected device were required to stream room audio back to the government for keyword matching and surveillance. We don't do this because of principles, because of the risk of enabling other crimes, and because it would be a bad tradeoff-- a lot of invasion when we have less invasive tools available. I'm arguing the same applies here.
uberman 2y ago
I don't quite get it. It seems that what this does is put the burden on reporting of this information back onto banks, not that this information will not be collected. Further it is my understanding that the reporting was to identify the up to four people who had controlling interests in companies with more than 20 employees and 5 million in sales. the intention being to reduce money laundering and terrorism. Name the four largest shareholders? This honestly does not seem like any kind of burden to me. If it is, I have way more burden reporting short vs long term capital gains or hell even renewing my passport.
- Henchman21 2y ago
  Perhaps you should consider that humans have been putting monumental amounts of effort to hide who owns these businesses? Its reasonable to me to assume that those who wish to conduct their business in the shadows have something to hide. Removing the light and returning to shadows? Does that seem like a good idea to you?
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > reasonable to me to assume that those who wish to conduct their business in the shadows have something to hide Remarkably close to the pitch against any privacy protection.
    - Henchman21 2y ago
      Yes yes, let’s take a law meant to shine a light on corruption and rebrand that law as the corruption itself.
      - vuln 2y ago
        What something is “meant” to do and what it actually “does” can be two wildly different things.
        redeux 2y ago
nullbyte808 2y ago
"not only will it not enforce any penalties or fines associated with the beneficial ownership information reporting rule under the existing regulatory deadlines, but it will further not enforce any penalties or fines against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies or their beneficial owners after the forthcoming rule changes take effect either" So now you can hide money offshore easier? Soo cool.
nullbyte808 2y ago
Maybe we can get him to get rid of FATCA reporting too? lmao
dboreham 2y ago
I don't understand the deep details of this, although I have submitted the forms for the three companies I own already but perhaps it arises from the weird nature of the US. It's a country, but not really. Specifically when you form a company it is registered with a state, not the country. The state knows (or could know) who you are. But, at least without looking in NSA databases, the federal government has no idea. Unless the state tells them. Which you might expect they would, but perhaps not? So this requirement is really there so the federal government gets a synced copy of the database each state already has, but done in the most inefficient way possible. The same weirdness shows up with identity documents (drivers' license) which again is issued by the state, but federal authorities want to get the data. Ending with the very odd situation that you can choose from two kinds of license in the state I live in: one works to get on a plane (federal administration) the other does not.
- timewizard 2y ago
  > one works to get on a plane (federal administration) the other does not. You can always just use a passport if you have the "federally limited" license. If you already have a passport there is almost no reason to get the federally linked license.
  - hiatus 2y ago
    Besides not having to use a passport when you fly domestically come May (unless it changes _yet again_).
Apreche 2y ago
With all these regulations being removed, I see no reason not to just start doing white collar crime. We’re being given permission. Who wants to launder some money?
- timewizard 2y ago
  So your morals are merely the product of what seems to be legal at the moment? And because one paperwork requirement got removed you now feel license to, by your own admission, commit crime? This is meant to be a cynical comment on the state of the world? I think your cynicism has eaten a part of you.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > morals are merely the product of what seems to be legal at the moment? I’d personally say it depends on the crime. If you’re laundering money to support a worthy cause, I’m not okay with it legally though I might be morally sympathetic. If the guys at the top aren’t following the law, the weight I put on the former is lessened and my sympathies in the latter may win out.
  - mint2 2y ago
    Well it matches how corporations already operate, they brag about being in compliance with regulations, fda or any other, as if it’s something to be proud of. No, just barely satisfying the minimum quality standards is not something to aspire to.
jrochkind1 2y ago
How do they just decide to stop enforcing a law passed by congress?
- datavirtue 2y ago
  You are witnessing the break down of law and order.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > You are witnessing the break down of law and order The rule of law. (And Presidents have done this before.) Law and order refers to crime and punishment [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_order_(politics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_order_(politics)
    - aSanchezStern 2y ago
      I mean, yeah, they are saying that you can commit a crime and they won't punish you. That's what "suspending enforcement" means. I think what you mean is that "law and order" is usually applied to poor criminals, where as what is happening here is refusing to enforce laws on the rich criminals.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > think what you mean is that "law and order" is usually applied to poor criminals No, I mean the “order” bit of law and order pertains to the criminal effects. The Wikipedia article has a good reference to examples of order without law. The law has been suspended. But we have no evidence of resulting criminality. If and when that criminality occurs, that is the breakdown of order.
- bananapub 2y ago
  the trick is to spend 30 years stacking the courts with charlatans who value the political project above all else, and to have a congress full of complete losers with no self respect or desire for public service
shipscode 2y ago
Incredible move for entrepreneurship in the USA. This created just another stupid piece of paper to file that we no longer have to - which was requested on shaky legal grounds and punished by $5000/day fines. This is information is already on file in tons of places, so the requirement is asinine - I personally never filed mine since it was caught up in the court but I'll gladly take this win.
- bananapub 2y ago
  > This is information is already on file in tons of places, so the requirement is asinine er, no it isn't, at least some states let you create fairly anonymous companies where the state has no idea of the actual owner of the company, and the lawyers who created it might not either.
- olyjohn 2y ago
  If it's just a piece of paper, what are you bitching about? Pull up your bootstraps and fill it out and quit your whining.
sitkack 2y ago
Are laws meaningless if they can arbitrarily suspend enforcement?
redeux 2y ago
The President has been accused of money laundering and now unilaterally decides the Treasury will no longer enforce a law aimed at reducing money laundering. It’s entirely self serving and obvious.
tmaly 2y ago
This is great news, I was going to have to file for my HOA. Seems like a complete waste of time.

78 points by greyface- 2y ago

Make big news about Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine but quietly shoot down the regulations that help to protect the people of USA.

nullc 2y ago
How does a regulation that creates an invasive federal ownership registry with no meaningful legislative controls on the confidentiality of that information help to protect the public?
- mixologic 2y ago
  None of that information has any right to confidentiality. It's in the public's interest to know who owns all the fraudlent accounting trick shell companies that exist solely to steal money from "hardworking taxpayers"
  - nullc 2y ago
    Nice presumption of guilt! Do you also think it's the public's right to have a camera in your bathroom because you might be snorting lines of coke in there? :) The beneficial ownership information goes well beyond shell companies doing weird accounting tricks. In particular, it makes it so that it's impossible to own a home without having your name connected to it in a vulnerable databases which criminals will almost certainly be able to access.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > with no meaningful legislative controls on the confidentiality of that information There are strong confidentiality protections around FinCEN’s BOI [1]. (Lol.) [1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-X/part-1010/subpart-J/section-1010.955 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-X/p...
  - nullc 2y ago
    There is significantly less protection than there is even for tax returns, which themselves clearly receive inadequate protection. In particular, blanket permission is given for warrentless access for "law enforcement activity" and undisclosed, target unauthorized access for "compliance with customer due diligence". And overall the restrictions are no stronger than "shall not"-- it's not a felony to violate the rules. In practice it's likely to end up like many states license plate databases where it's easy for sleazy PIs to just bribe access through corrupt LEO or agency desk staff.
- Geeek 2y ago
  What makes it invasive?
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Why should any of it be confidential? When you ask our government to grant you special privileges, seems like we should know who's benefiting. Don't like it, don't incorporate and don't enjoy the benefits.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > When you ask our government to grant you special privileges You ask your state to create a corporation. You ask your bank to give it a bank account. The U.S. requires the bank to make you told the U.S. who your beneficial owners are. This isn’t a story about a party granting privileges asking for something in return. And the parties granting those privileges, states and banks, don’t treat them as privileges. Being denied an LLC is extraordinary in every U.S. jurisdiction I know. Being denied a bank account is more common, but still often requires some reason. (Even if it isn’t communicated to the customer.) Note that my argument is narrow: your argument doesn’t hold. I agree with you in these data not deserving confidentiality. But not because incorporation is a privilege, but because there is a social good to making it public and social cost to letting people hide behind fictitious persons. (Where I disagree with the CTA is in making these data only available to law enforcement and the like. FinCEN’s BOI should be public.)
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      I think the ability to steer a potentially-immortal "legal entity" with capabilities that an individual citizen doesn't have, and that has zero existence outside what what we collectively will into existence via the government, is definitely a privilege. But yes, there's also a strong argument in favor of transparency here because it's a good, pro-social idea. My argument is more a counter to folks crying that their liberty's being stepped on or whatever. Government creates corporations, we can have it do what we want with/to them, some moral argument against our at least being able to know who the hell's benefiting from these creations of our government is somewhere in "not even wrong" territory.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
- donmcronald 2y ago
  Why shouldn't it be public? We should be allowed to know who owns a company, especially when it's trivial for anyone with a bit of money to set up and tear down a company. If you let that be anonymous, how do you ever hold anyone liable for anything? The customer relationship will be owned by a throw away company and you end up with a buyer beware system where bad actors spin things up and down so quickly that no one can keep track of anything or hold anyone accountable. Think of selling lead paint. If I sell using a company with beneficial ownership known, you can eventually ban me from getting a business registration in that category. If I don't have to disclose that info, I could start a new company every month using different branding and I'd have a dozen "different" products on the market before regulators would be able to unwind the first company. We even have a small preview of that system. Look at the quality, or lack of quality rather, of products bought off of Amazon. It's all the same garbage sold through dozens of different brands. Once it delves into the realm of being illegal, you need to be able to cut it off at the source, aka beneficial owners that are being enriched. Would you argue against knowing the owner for personal bank accounts? I can't walk into a bank and open an account without them knowing exactly who I am and every bank account I have is tied by to the same, real world identity - me. Why should I participate in that invasive system if rich people with shell companies don't have to?
- TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
  The last time I read the Federal Register and SORN documents for the BOI Registry, they were _explicitly_ confidential, limited to government access based on need. There are already legislative oversight controls in place.

throwaway5752 2y ago

For the record https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/Corporate_Transparency_Act.pdf https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/Corporate_... It is the sense of Congress that— (1) more than 2,000,000 corporations and limited liability companies are being formed under the laws of the States each year; (2) most or all States do not require information about the beneficial owners of the corporations, limited liability companies, or other similar entities formed under the laws of the State; (3) malign actors seek to conceal their ownership of corporations, limited liability companies, or other similar entities in the United States to facilitate illicit activity, including money laundering, the financing of terrorism, proliferation financing, serious tax fraud, human and drug trafficking, counterfeiting, piracy, securities fraud, financial fraud, and acts of foreign corruption, harming the national security interests of the United States and allies of the United States; (4) money launderers and others involved in commercial activity intentionally conduct transactions through corporate structures in order to evade detection, and may layer such structures, much like Russian nesting ‘‘Matryoshka’’ dolls, across various secretive jurisdictions such that each time an investigator obtains ownership records for a domestic or foreign entity, the newly identified entity is yet another corporate entity, necessitating a repeat of the same process; (5) Federal legislation providing for the collection of beneficial ownership information for corporations, limited liability companies, or other similar entities formed under the laws of the States is needed to— (A) set a clear, Federal standard for incorporation practices; (B) protect vital Unites States national security interests; (C) protect interstate and foreign commerce; (D) better enable critical national security, intelligence, and law enforcement efforts to counter money laundering, the financing of terrorism, and other illicit activity; and (E) bring the United States into compliance with international anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism standards; (6) beneficial ownership information collected under the amendments made by this title is sensitive information and will be directly available only to authorized government authorities, subject to effective safeguards and controls, to (A) facilitate important national security, intelligence, and law enforcement activities; and (B) confirm beneficial ownership information provided to financial institutions to facilitate the compliance of the financial institutions with anti-money laundering, countering the financing of terrorism, and customer due diligence requirements under applicable law; (7) consistent with applicable law, the Secretary of the Treasury shall— (A) maintain the information described in paragraph (1) in a secure, nonpublic database, using information security methods and techniques that are appropriate to protect nonclassified information systems at the highest security level; and (B) take all steps, including regular auditing, to ensure that government authorities accessing beneficial ownership information do so only for authorized purposes consistent with this title; and (8) in prescribing regulations to provide for the reporting of beneficial ownership information, the Secretary shall, to the greatest extent practicable consistent with the purposes of this title— (A) seek to minimize burdens on reporting companies associated with the collection of beneficial ownership information; (B) provide clarity to reporting companies concerning the identification of their beneficial owners; and (C) collect information in a form and manner that is reasonably designed to generate a database that is highly useful to national security, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies and Federal functional regulators. Today is a massive victory for criminals.

legitster 2y ago

I can understand trying to cut red tape, but this law was intended to fight the money laundering schemes the cartels used to fund their operations. The administration is threatening war with other countries under the guise of illegal drugs, but will roll over if it means they can't cheat on taxes anymore. It's not like they are rolling back the incredibly expensive and privacy invading "Know-Your-Customer" rules across banking as a whole.

nullc 2y ago
If a cartel is alone in the forest carrying out no kidnappings, assignations, drug sales, or other physical effects that can be policed by conventional means... does it matter? The beneficial ownership registration was a massive privacy invasion with little hope of providing more than an incidental benefit to the claimed applications. Those cartels would just fail to register ownership or stick patsy proxies in place. > It's not like they are rolling back the incredibly expensive and privacy invading "Know-Your-Customer" rules across banking as a whole. One step at a time.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Your argument is “if cartels are magically not a problem, then they’re not a problem and then this is useless?” I don’t think I understand your comment.
  - nullc 2y ago
    My point is that invading people's privacy on ownership is not a requirement for effective law enforcement against cartels. Cartels may well commit secondary crimes related to money laundering, but the things cartels do that we actually care about are not that and don't require extensive privacy invasion to police. To use a silly example, we could also cut down on cartel activity (and many other serious crimes) if every internet connected device were required to stream room audio back to the government for keyword matching and surveillance. We don't do this because of principles, because of the risk of enabling other crimes, and because it would be a bad tradeoff-- a lot of invasion when we have less invasive tools available. I'm arguing the same applies here.

uberman 2y ago

I don't quite get it. It seems that what this does is put the burden on reporting of this information back onto banks, not that this information will not be collected. Further it is my understanding that the reporting was to identify the up to four people who had controlling interests in companies with more than 20 employees and 5 million in sales. the intention being to reduce money laundering and terrorism. Name the four largest shareholders? This honestly does not seem like any kind of burden to me. If it is, I have way more burden reporting short vs long term capital gains or hell even renewing my passport.

Henchman21 2y ago
Perhaps you should consider that humans have been putting monumental amounts of effort to hide who owns these businesses? Its reasonable to me to assume that those who wish to conduct their business in the shadows have something to hide. Removing the light and returning to shadows? Does that seem like a good idea to you?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > reasonable to me to assume that those who wish to conduct their business in the shadows have something to hide Remarkably close to the pitch against any privacy protection.
  - Henchman21 2y ago
    Yes yes, let’s take a law meant to shine a light on corruption and rebrand that law as the corruption itself.
    - vuln 2y ago
      What something is “meant” to do and what it actually “does” can be two wildly different things.
      - redeux 2y ago

nullbyte808 2y ago

"not only will it not enforce any penalties or fines associated with the beneficial ownership information reporting rule under the existing regulatory deadlines, but it will further not enforce any penalties or fines against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies or their beneficial owners after the forthcoming rule changes take effect either" So now you can hide money offshore easier? Soo cool.

nullbyte808 2y ago

Maybe we can get him to get rid of FATCA reporting too? lmao

dboreham 2y ago

I don't understand the deep details of this, although I have submitted the forms for the three companies I own already but perhaps it arises from the weird nature of the US. It's a country, but not really. Specifically when you form a company it is registered with a state, not the country. The state knows (or could know) who you are. But, at least without looking in NSA databases, the federal government has no idea. Unless the state tells them. Which you might expect they would, but perhaps not? So this requirement is really there so the federal government gets a synced copy of the database each state already has, but done in the most inefficient way possible. The same weirdness shows up with identity documents (drivers' license) which again is issued by the state, but federal authorities want to get the data. Ending with the very odd situation that you can choose from two kinds of license in the state I live in: one works to get on a plane (federal administration) the other does not.

timewizard 2y ago
> one works to get on a plane (federal administration) the other does not. You can always just use a passport if you have the "federally limited" license. If you already have a passport there is almost no reason to get the federally linked license.
- hiatus 2y ago
  Besides not having to use a passport when you fly domestically come May (unless it changes _yet again_).

Apreche 2y ago

With all these regulations being removed, I see no reason not to just start doing white collar crime. We’re being given permission. Who wants to launder some money?

timewizard 2y ago
So your morals are merely the product of what seems to be legal at the moment? And because one paperwork requirement got removed you now feel license to, by your own admission, commit crime? This is meant to be a cynical comment on the state of the world? I think your cynicism has eaten a part of you.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > morals are merely the product of what seems to be legal at the moment? I’d personally say it depends on the crime. If you’re laundering money to support a worthy cause, I’m not okay with it legally though I might be morally sympathetic. If the guys at the top aren’t following the law, the weight I put on the former is lessened and my sympathies in the latter may win out.
- mint2 2y ago
  Well it matches how corporations already operate, they brag about being in compliance with regulations, fda or any other, as if it’s something to be proud of. No, just barely satisfying the minimum quality standards is not something to aspire to.

jrochkind1 2y ago

How do they just decide to stop enforcing a law passed by congress?

datavirtue 2y ago
You are witnessing the break down of law and order.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > You are witnessing the break down of law and order The rule of law. (And Presidents have done this before.) Law and order refers to crime and punishment [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_order_(politics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_order_(politics)
  - aSanchezStern 2y ago
    I mean, yeah, they are saying that you can commit a crime and they won't punish you. That's what "suspending enforcement" means. I think what you mean is that "law and order" is usually applied to poor criminals, where as what is happening here is refusing to enforce laws on the rich criminals.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > think what you mean is that "law and order" is usually applied to poor criminals No, I mean the “order” bit of law and order pertains to the criminal effects. The Wikipedia article has a good reference to examples of order without law. The law has been suspended. But we have no evidence of resulting criminality. If and when that criminality occurs, that is the breakdown of order.
bananapub 2y ago
the trick is to spend 30 years stacking the courts with charlatans who value the political project above all else, and to have a congress full of complete losers with no self respect or desire for public service

shipscode 2y ago

Incredible move for entrepreneurship in the USA. This created just another stupid piece of paper to file that we no longer have to - which was requested on shaky legal grounds and punished by $5000/day fines. This is information is already on file in tons of places, so the requirement is asinine - I personally never filed mine since it was caught up in the court but I'll gladly take this win.

bananapub 2y ago
> This is information is already on file in tons of places, so the requirement is asinine er, no it isn't, at least some states let you create fairly anonymous companies where the state has no idea of the actual owner of the company, and the lawyers who created it might not either.
olyjohn 2y ago
If it's just a piece of paper, what are you bitching about? Pull up your bootstraps and fill it out and quit your whining.

sitkack 2y ago

Are laws meaningless if they can arbitrarily suspend enforcement?

redeux 2y ago

The President has been accused of money laundering and now unilaterally decides the Treasury will no longer enforce a law aimed at reducing money laundering. It’s entirely self serving and obvious.

tmaly 2y ago

This is great news, I was going to have to file for my HOA. Seems like a complete waste of time.