The US Treasury permanently ended beneficial ownership reporting for domestic companies on 11 August 2026 and ordered the deletion of the ownership records it had already collected on US filers, closing the only federal register that ever required anonymous US companies to name the people who own and control them.
FinCEN, Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, issued the final rule that guts the central requirement of the 2020 Corporate Transparency Act, the law that for the first time in decades forced anonymous US companies to disclose their true owners. The rule lifts the requirement from more than 99 per cent of the entities that used to report, a figure drawn from the Government Accountability Office's own review of the exemptions, and directs the agency to wipe every record filed by US persons from the database.
Records already copied into a law enforcement case file can survive, but the central store that let an investigator run a company name and find a live human owner will be emptied of US based filers. Foreign reporting companies must still name their foreign owners. Foreign firms no longer report the US individuals who acted as their company applicants, and foreign pooled investment vehicles registered in the United States are exempted from naming the US investors who control them.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed the rule cut red tape for allegedly "small business" and boasted it was a victory for what he called "common sense". FinCEN put the continuing saving at roughly $9 billion a year.
What the registry was built to stop
Shell companies formed in Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada and other states have regularly let cartels, organised crime networks, sanctioned oligarchs and arms dealers hold US property, bank accounts and businesses without their names reaching anywhere an investigator could look. A buyer who wants to move dirty money into the United States has long needed only a registered agent and a state filing fee to place it behind a wall no subpoena could easily climb.
The Corporate Transparency Act, passed over Trump's veto in December 2020, built a single federal register to breach that wall. Access sat with law enforcement and, in narrow cases, banks running due diligence, never the public. Owners of most small companies had to file one form naming the individuals who ultimately owned or controlled the entity, the disclosure that turns an anonymous LLC into a name a prosecutor can follow.
Treasury's own 2026 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment recorded shell company cases that laundered the proceeds of drug trafficking, cybercrime and fraud, the same threat the register was meant to help expose. The Government Accountability Office told Treasury in the same period to identify actions that would close the gaps its exemptions had opened and to hand law enforcement the information the statute still requires it to provide. Treasury disagreed with the recommendation.
Tom Malinowski, the former congressman who helped pass the law, said the administration was "doing this to help criminals", and said records already in law enforcement's hands may be impossible to reconstruct once the central database is wiped.
Money laundering
A cartel placing drug cash into the banking system, a fraud ring cashing out stolen funds and a sanctioned official hiding a penthouse all reach for the same instrument: a company whose registered owner is another company, whose owner is a name on no public form. The Financial Action Task Force, the international body that sets anti-money-laundering standards, has flagged anonymous US corporate ownership as a weakness in the US system for years.
FinCEN spent a decade documenting the pattern before the register existed. Its geographic targeting orders forced title insurers in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and other markets to report the humans behind all-cash luxury property bought through shell companies, after investigators found that a large share of high-end purchases in those cities ran through anonymous entities. Global Witness and other watchdogs traced the same money into US towers and estates held by owners no public record could name.
Erasing the ownership database returns the country to the blind spot the Corporate Transparency Act was created to end. An investigator who pulls a suspicious company in 2027 will find a registered agent, a filing fee and nothing behind them, the position that has let laundered money settle into US real estate and banks for decades.
BuzzFeed News counted the buyers behind Trump's own condominium sales: 21 per cent of the roughly 6,400 Trump-branded units sold across the United States, more than 1,300 flats worth about $1.5 billion, went to shell companies paying all cash, the two features Treasury names as the clearest markers of possible money laundering.
Global Witness traced the pre-construction sales at the Trump Ocean Club in Panama, a tower Trump licensed his name to for millions, and found units moving through convicted criminals. Alexandre Ventura Nogueira, the Brazilian broker who sold roughly a third of the building before it opened, was arrested in 2009 for real estate fraud and admitted laundering money for corrupt Panamanian politicians. David Murcia Guzmán, a Colombian later convicted in a US federal court of laundering drug-cartel money through real estate, bought a block of units through him. Louis Pargiolas, another early buyer, pleaded guilty in Miami in 2009 to conspiracy to import cocaine.
Arkady Vodovozov, an investor in Ventura Nogueira's brokerage, had been convicted of kidnapping in Israel. Stanislav Kavalenka, a broker in the same network, was charged in Canada with compelling women into prostitution, and Igor Anapolskiy, another of its brokers, was convicted in Ukraine in 2014 of forging travel documents.
David Bogatin, a Russian émigré whom reporters have linked to the Brighton Beach mob, bought five condominiums in Trump Tower in 1984 for about $6 million, and was convicted three years later of a gasoline-tax fraud that drained tens of millions from the state before he fled the country. Felix Sater, the Moscow-born developer whose firm Bayrock built the Trump SoHo hotel from an office two floors below Trump's own, had pleaded guilty to racketeering in a mafia-run stock fraud in 1998 and, earlier, served time for stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a broken margarita glass.
Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a crime boss on the US State Department's transnational-organised-crime wanted list, ran an international gambling and money-laundering ring out of Trump Tower until a 2013 federal indictment broke it up. Its New York operation worked from a Trump Tower apartment owned by Vadim Trincher, who pleaded guilty to racketeering and was sentenced to five years.
Kushner Companies, the family firm run by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, reached for foreign money through the EB-5 programme, which trades US residency for large investments. In 2017 Jared's sister Nicole Kushner Meyer pitched wealthy Chinese investors in Beijing on a New Jersey tower while mentioning her brother's role in the White House. The Securities and Exchange Commission and members of Congress opened inquiries into the firm's EB-5 fundraising, and its distressed tower at 666 Fifth Avenue was rescued in 2018 through a 99-year lease to Brookfield, a company partly funded by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund.
A shell company or an all-cash purchase hid the owner behind the Panama tower, the Trump Tower units and the Trump-branded condos, the cover the beneficial ownership register was built to strip away.
The president's casinos
FinCEN fined the Trump Taj Mahal $10 million in 2015 for what it called "willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act", after the Atlantic City casino failed to keep an effective anti-money-laundering programme, failed to report suspicious transactions and failed to file the currency reports the law required. The agency said the resort had run those failures for years.
FinCEN had penalised the same casino once before. In 1998 it assessed a $477,700 civil penalty against the Taj Mahal for currency transaction reporting failures, and its director, Jennifer Shasky Calvery, said in 2015 that the casino had "received many warnings about its deficiencies" over violations dating to 2003.
The president who signed the rule erasing ownership records once owned a casino that federal regulators twice penalised for failing to guard against money laundering. Unfiled reports and unwatched cash meant the large transactions that would flag a launderer were never captured, the work an anti-money-laundering programme exists to do and the work the Taj Mahal did not.
Robert LiButti, the biggest gambler in Trump Plaza's early years, lost more than $20 million at Trump's Atlantic City tables through the 1980s and was barred from Atlantic City in 1991 as an associate of the Gambino boss John Gotti. New Jersey regulators fined Trump Plaza $450,000 after finding it had dodged the state ban on cash gifts by handing LiButti luxury cars he sold straight back for cash to gamble, and penalised the casino again for removing Black and women dealers at his demand. Trump said he "wouldn't know him if he was standing in front of me", though wiretaps caught LiButti describing flights in Trump's helicopter.
Vyacheslav Ivankov, a Russian mafia boss of the highest rank, hid from the FBI in a Trump Tower condo through the mid-1990s while gambling at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, the casino was popular among Russian mobsters who drew comps of up to $100,000 a visit. An FBI affidavit named Semion Mogilevich, the Russian-Israeli boss on the bureau's most-wanted list, as one of Ivankov's closest associates.
Mogilevich built his fortune on shell companies of exactly the kind the ownership register was meant to pierce. The FBI, which calls him a "boss of bosses" of the Russian mob and keeps him on its most-wanted list under a $5 million bounty, says he has laundered money through more than 100 front companies and held accounts in at least 27 countries. YBM Magnex International, a magnet maker he floated on the Toronto Stock Exchange, reached a paper value of $1 billion before an FBI raid in 1998 exposed it as a front and wiped it out. In 1991 Mogilevich paid a Russian judge to free Ivankov from a Siberian prison, sending him to New York to live at a Trump Tower condo and play the Taj. David Bogatin's brother ran a $150 million stock fraud with Mogilevich while Bogatin held his five Trump Tower condos, and Felix Sater, whose Bayrock built Trump SoHo from a Trump Tower office, had a father reporting has linked to Mogilevich's organisation.
The Epstein files
Jeffrey Epstein ran his money through a lattice of trusts and shell companies, Southern Trust Company, Plan D LLC and Great St Jim LLC among them, several in the US Virgin Islands where ownership disclosure was thin. Payments from wealthy men flowed in and back out.
Trump and Epstein ran together for about 15 years, photographed at Mar-a-Lago in 1992, 1997 and 2000 and logged aboard Epstein's jet in 1997. Trump told New York magazine in 2002 that Epstein was "a terrific guy" who "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side". Trump has said he later barred Epstein and knew nothing of his crimes.
Alexander Acosta, the US attorney in Miami, signed the 2008 non-prosecution deal that let Epstein plead to state charges and serve about 13 months with daytime release. He became Trump's labour secretary and was forced out in 2019 when the deal resurfaced.
The Justice Department said in a July 2025 memo that Epstein kept no "client list" and released nothing more, months after Attorney General Pam Bondi had said the list was "sitting on my desk".
The Senate Finance Committee, still mapping the network, has demanded Treasury's suspicious activity reports on payments tied to Epstein and his associates. Ron Wyden, its ranking Democrat, said Bessent twice refused to hand them over and called him "a willing participant in the Trump administration's Epstein cover-up". Tracing a shell company to the person behind it is what such an inquiry depends on, and the Treasury now deleting the ownership register is the same office withholding the Epstein records.
KleptoCapture
Trump ordered a pause on Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement in February 2025, freezing investigations into corporate bribery abroad, and the Department of Justice issued narrowed enforcement guidelines that June. Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded Task Force KleptoCapture the same month, folding away the unit set up to seize the yachts, jets and property of sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
Foreign bribery cases, oligarch asset seizures and anonymous ownership filings were the three instruments a prosecutor could reach for to track hidden money into the country, and by the summer of 2026 all three had been paused, dissolved or deleted.
Qatar handed the Trump administration a Boeing 747-8 worth about $400 million in May 2025, a jet accepted to serve as Air Force One and then pass to Trump's presidential library foundation once he leaves office. Democrats and watchdog groups said the gift breached the Constitution's foreign emoluments clause, which bars federal officials from taking presents from foreign states, and Trump said he would be "stupid" to turn it down.
The Antwerp World Diamond Centre, a public-private body tied to the Belgian government, handed Trump an 18-carat gold ring set with 321 diamonds in June 2026, weeks before his administration exempted European diamonds from the tariffs that had shut Belgium out of the US market. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal called the ring "a cartoonish bribe" and said foreign interests could "buy lucrative tariff exemptions simply by showering President Trump with shiny gifts". The emoluments clause bars a president from taking gifts from foreign states without the consent of Congress, and bribery law turns on a thing of value given for an official act. The senators laid out the sequence: the ring in June, the tariff exemption in July.
The president's own money
Trump reported more than $1 billion in cryptocurrency income for 2025 on his federal financial disclosure, much of it through World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture his family launched while he held office. His family's net worth rose by an estimated $2.9 billion over the year on the back of those holdings, according to a CBS News analysis of the filing.
World Liberty Financial sells digital tokens whose buyers can hold them without ever filing a name, in the same year the government it answers to has dismantled the registers that would have demanded one. A foreign fund, a sanctioned entity or a domestic donor can route money into a presidential family business through channels the FCPA pause, the KleptoCapture shutdown and the ownership deletion have each, in turn, taken off the map.
Casey Michel, who has written two books on US money laundering, said the rollback serves "only one purpose: to make corruption easier to conceal".
Senator Elizabeth Warren called the rule "a gift to cartels, criminals and US adversaries" who move money through shell companies.
What it costs everyone else
The move will especially harm US renters and individuals vulnerable to scam operations. Anonymous property deals reach ordinary renters and buyers through price. Close to a third of US home sales are now all-cash, a record share by Redfin's count, and a buyer paying cash through a shell company beats a family that needs a mortgage every time. Nearly half of renters already spend more than 30 per cent of their income on housing, the line the government draws to call a household rent-burdened.
Investigators who trace shell company purchases keep finding towers of luxury flats bought as anonymous holdings and left dark. The FACT Coalition counted close to half the units empty in parts of Miami and roughly 40 per cent across stretches of Manhattan, homes bought to store money rather than to live in. Each empty unit is a home taken off the market and a high comparable sale that lifts the asking price on every flat around it, and the first-time buyer bidding against an unnamed cash offer is the one who loses. A New York Times investigation once called such holdings "safe deposit boxes in the sky".
US consumers reported losing $12.5 billion to scams in 2024, a record, and older people bore the worst of it. The Federal Trade Commission put reported losses among them at $2.4 billion and its estimate of the true figure far higher, since shame keeps many victims silent. Imposter scammers who empty a retiree's savings or 401(k) move the money through faceless accounts and shell companies within hours.
FinCEN's 2025 analysis of bank reports tied about $1.4 billion in suspicious transactions to fentanyl trafficking in a single year, much of it moved by Chinese laundering networks that wash cartel cash through trade and front companies before it returns to the traffickers. The drug those profits pay for kills tens of thousands of people in the US a year.
Locking it in
Ohio Representative Warren Davidson's Repealing Big Brother Overreach Act cleared the House Financial Services Committee in April by a single vote. FinCEN ended the disclosure requirement through a rule, and a later administration could undo it with another rule. Davidson's bill would strike the requirement from the statute itself, out of the reach of any future rule-making.
Senate allies introduced a matching bill in July and aimed to attach the repeal to this year's defence authorisation bill, the annual military measure that passes even when the rest of Congress stalls.
