ICIJ reports:
It’s Sept. 20, 2020, and a brand new ICIJ investigation has pushed a relatively small unit of the U.S. Treasury into a glaring global spotlight… Named for the Treasury’s Financial Crime Enforcement Network, whose leaked files were at the heart of the investigation, the FinCEN Files exposed more than $2 trillion of potentially dirty money flowing around the world — all via U.S. banks.Published in collaboration with BuzzFeed News and more than 100 media outlets from 88 countries, the investigation sparked global debates about cash flows, crime and corruption, and spurred lawmakers — including those in Washington, D.C. — to push anti-money-laundering reforms to the top of their agenda.Activists and advocates who had spent decades fighting financial secrecy cheered when, in January 2021, the U.S. passed landmark legislation that sought to clamp down on anonymous companies, including plans to build a database of U.S. company owners that would make it much harder for criminals to hide their dodgy dealings.Fast forward to today, and much of that excitement and hope has been replaced with anxiety. Reporter Spencer Woodman spoke with experts who are struggling to understand why, two years after the FinCEN Files, seemingly little has been done to get this company register up and running.“There is a lot of anxiety that the Biden administration will take the whole four years to finalize the rules setting up the beneficial ownership registry,” Elise Bean, an anti-corruption expert and former chief counsel of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said. “It is hard to understand what is taking so long.”A spokesperson told ICIJ that FinCEN is “working expeditiously to promulgate rules to implement the statute” but there was no set date for those rules to be published.
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