Kuttner on TAP: Smoking Out Oligarchs, Russian and Other

One of the few progressive pieces of legislation to become law during the Trump presidency was called the Corporate Transparency Act. The law, sponsored by Democrats Carolyn Maloney and Maxine Waters in the House and Sherrod Brown in the Senate, requires the beneficial owners of all financial assets to disclose their true identity to regulatory agencies and the IRS.

The bill was originally introduced in 2009, by Rep. Maloney in the House and Carl Levin, then chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the Senate. But there was little interest from the Obama Treasury, despite their international commitments to press for disclosure of beneficial ownership.

Eventually, the Obama Treasury issued rules requiring banks to “know your customer” (the customer due diligence rule), which opened the door to legislation. The Trump Treasury was surprisingly cooperative, since the big banks wanted disclosure burdens to be on customers rather than on banks.

It is a charming irony that the president who signed this bill was infamous, both as a real estate operator and as a political operative, for his use of shell companies. The bill was finally enacted on January 1, 2021, and signed into law by Trump, as part of a must-pass annual defense bill.

At the time the law was enacted, its main purpose was to go after terrorists, drug traffickers, other money launderers, criminals, and tax evaders. But in the era of economic sanctions against Russia, and new appreciation of how oligarchs conceal their identity, the law has new value in smoking out hidden ownership of property on multiple fronts.

Oligarchs and kleptocrats are notorious for hiding wealth in high-end real estate, in London, New York, Miami, and other super-luxe destinations. Many apartments in grotesquely opulent condo buildings are largely unoccupied. Indeed, oligarch wealth-concealing is driving much of the boom of high-end condos now pockmarking Manhattan.

Rules carrying out this law were supposed to be in place by January 2022. Unfortunately, the rulemaking process is still ongoing, with half of the draft rule issued last summer and the full final rule still to be issued, hopefully later this year. So it will be a while before government agencies have this database.

The Russia sanctions ought to get Treasury to focus. The small-business lobby, via the National Federation of Independent Businesses and American Bar Association, has pressed to weaken the details of the rules.

One loophole in this otherwise exemplary law is that it requires beneficial owners of assets to be disclosed to the IRS, the Treasury, and appropriate financial regulatory agencies. But in the case of registries of deeds, the information is public. In various financial scandals, the true owners, speculators, and flippers of real estate were able to hide behind straws, trusts, and other kinds of shells. The identity of the beneficial owner should be public record.