[carbonguy]

Looking over the "fact sheet" linked in the announcement[1], this appears to be the key requirement:

> When filing [Beneficial Ownership Information] reports with FinCEN, the rule requires a reporting company to identify itself and report four pieces of information about each of its beneficial owners: name, birthdate, address, and a unique identifying number and issuing jurisdiction from an acceptable identification document (and the image of such document).

While I could wish this information would be public in the same way as eg. SEC form 4 filings, this rule really does feel (to me, a rank layman) like a big step forward for corporate transparency... to government, at least. Still pretty exciting!

Any corporate legal eagles out there who have an actual informed perspective to share on this new rule and its possible effects?

[1]: https://www.fincen.gov/beneficial-ownership-information-repo...

[peyton]

Looking fwd to paying my lawyers a bit more. The bad guys will keep operating under one of many exemptions and workarounds.

[jprete]

Not that I'm a lawyer, but this rule strikes me has having a lot of potential. If a company declares false beneficiaries, it may be hard to find the true beneficiary, but I would think it's a lot easier to find and prosecute everyone involved in the false declaration.

[donmcronald]

Or just seize everything that no one is willing to claim ownership of.

[supertrope]

Civil asset forfeiture applies to non-powerful people like immigrants who like cash, and silent generation people who never trusted banks again. The powerful would slip away and the government would seize middle class grandma’s house after she used an LLC but forgot to file FinCEN paperwork.

[peyton]

No need to declare false beneficiaries. Click through to the final rule and ctrl-F “exempt”, then keep in mind there are jurisdictions that approach capital formation by creating structures that fall into those categories.

[nullc]

> While I could wish this information would be public

oh absolutely, that would very useful for when you want to find where varrious people that you'd like to murder live when they unhelpfully owned their home via an entity to keep their address private.

As it is you'll just have to wait for fincen to leak or sell the data, since thankfully congress provided for no meaningful consequences for this datas disclosure or misuse.