Treasury Department Ends Ownership Reporting For US Small Businesses

Authored by Owen Evans via The Epoch Times,

The Treasury Department on Tuesday finalized a rule permanently exempting U.S. companies and individuals from reporting beneficial ownership information to authorities, rolling back Biden-era Corporate Transparency Act requirements.

"Today's action is a victory for common sense and American small businesses," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement on Aug. 11.

"President [Donald] Trump promised to cut red tape, and this final rule delivers. Treasury is eliminating a burdensome reporting requirement for millions of law-abiding business owners without compromising our national security."

The original rules, implemented under the Biden administration, had applied to tens of millions of mostly small businesses.

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is the 2021 law requiring shell companies to disclose owners, and the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is the enforcer.

The new policy means that U.S. companies and U.S individuals no longer have to tell FinCEN who owns them.

However, foreign reporting companies will have to disclose beneficial ownership information for foreign individuals, the department said in a statement.

The Treasury Department said that FinCEN will also delete previously reported information by Americans from the government's beneficial ownership information database.

FinCEN had previously implemented rules requiring certain companies to report beneficial ownership data as part of anti-corruption and anti-money laundering efforts backed by lawmakers and the Treasury Department under former President Joe Biden.

The latest move adopts the exemptions set out in the interim final rule issued in March 2025, part of a broader push by the Trump administration. At the time, the Treasury announced that it would not enforce the CTA against "U.S. citizens, domestic reporting companies, or their beneficial owners."

Under the beneficial ownership information scheme, small businesses had to submit personal information about their beneficial owners, including name, address, birth date, and other information from a piece of identification such as a driver's license.

"Having a centralized database of beneficial ownership information will eliminate critical vulnerabilities in our financial system and allow us to tackle the scourge of illicit finance enabled by opaque corporate structures," then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement about it in 2024.

Estimates suggested that the reporting requirement would have applied to approximately 32 million businesses, including corporations and limited liability companies.

Failure to comply would have come with sizable penalties.

Businesses and their owners faced civil penalties of up to $591 for each day they did not file. They could have also endured $10,000 in criminal fines and faced up to two years in prison if regulators found that businesses submitted false information or willfully did not file, correct, or update beneficial ownership information reports.

In May, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report that recommended that the Treasury identify potential actions to address the risks posed by the domestic reporting company and U.S. person exemptions.

"Illicit actors frequently use corporate structures such as shell companies to launder criminal proceeds. These structures can be exploited because they allow the identities of people who benefit from or control them to be hidden from law enforcement," it said.

It also said that Congress and law enforcement should be provided with "highly useful information that addresses these risks."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, said rolling back the reporting requirements increased the risk of organized criminal activity.

"This is a gift to cartels, criminals, and U.S. adversaries that exploit shell companies to move millions through our financial system," she said in an Aug. 11 post on X.

"Secretary Bessent should testify in front of Congress to explain his decision to put our national security at risk."

Andrew Moran and Reuters contributed to this report.