Republicans Are Dismantling a Key Tool in the War Against Kleptocrats | The New Republic

"Efforts to bring the barest transparency to U.S. shell companies stretch back to at least 2008. But it wasn’t until the early 2020s that legislators finally passed something called the Corporate Transparency Act. The bill was hardly partisan; remarkably, a slate of legislators from both sides of the aisle passed the bill over President Trump’s veto. Nor was the bill onerous. Instead of a public registry of corporate owners, as seen in places like the United Kingdom, America’s new shell company database would remain private, accessible only to federal authorities and other officials tracking illicit and looted wealth.

It’s difficult to overstate just how momentous this new legislation was. For the first time in decades, the U.S. was no longer the leading font of anonymous shell companies. The best days of U.S. offshoring appeared behind us....

Barely a month into his second term, Trump announced that the Corporate Transparency Act was an “absolute disaster,” an “economic menace” that would “soon be no more.” He announced that his administration would no longer be enforcing the law for U.S. shell companies—and that no one would need to worry about prosecution for breaking the law. A few months later, Trump’s Treasury Department announced that it was destroying all of the filings the registry had compiled thus far, torching the database entirely....

In late April, Trump’s allies on the House Financial Services Committee pushed through legislation by a one-vote margin to formally repeal the requirement that U.S. shells divulge their true owners."