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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28054 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Inching closer to the eradication of financial privacy

FinCEN has new rules taking effect over the next year and a half that require basically all companies to disclose the "beneficial owners".

The rule will require most corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities created in or registered to do business in the United States to report information about their beneficial owners—the persons who ultimately own or control the company, to FinCEN. Designed to protect U.S. national security and strengthen the integrity and transparency of the U.S. financial system, the rule will help to stop criminal actors, including oligarchs, kleptocrats, drug traffickers, human traffickers, and those who would use anonymous shell companies to hide their illicit proceeds.

I won't quote the whole thing but it's a short and easy read.

This statement is a bit disturbing:

FinCEN will engage in additional rulemakings to: (1) establish rules for who may access beneficial ownership information, for what purposes, and what safeguards will be required to ensure that the information is secured and protected [...]

This provides another avenue for rogue members of institutions to leak private information to hurt people they don't like. Depending on the rules that ultimately come out, this avenue could be very wide, especially since there is often discretion over when to enforce the rules.

My revulsion to these rules goes beyond the erosion of privacy, though. It should be possible to be a citizen of a place without exposing your entire life to the mercy of its government. You can't avoid being at its physical mercy when you're within its territory, but you can leave now and then. The way financial rules work in the U.S., you have to report and pay taxes on all finances, even work and investments in other countries. You also have to pay taxes on income that doesn't affect anybody else (income you haven't spent). With these new rules, you might have to pay a reputational tax when wealth you were keeping private gets exposed. I would much prefer citizenship or investment in a place to be like membership in a club - you're judged by your behavior at club events, not by your life outside it.

It is a way to increase the aristocracy of pull. Why do they need to know who owns investment X? Well if we don’t like Y we can freeze that asset (as with what grossly happened with the oligarchs). It is an attack on private property.

You don't need to know who is behind the company to freeze a company's assets.

Exactly. It isn’t about the company; it is about the owner.

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