Forget Panama (okay, not exactly), what about US company formation?

Mossack Fonseca may have some explaining to do when it comes to company formation, notching up over 200,000 structures, not too many questions asked, over 40 years, but then it, and Panama as a whole, are two-bit players against… the United States. Some two million corporations are created annually in the US, “more than the rest of the world put together,” noted Elise Bean, former staff director, Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), at the ACAMSmoneylaundering.com 21st annual conference in Miami, and certain states - notoriously Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada - require minimal background checks on who are the natural persons behind them. These onshore jurisdictions have fought every attempt to mandate more comprehensive registration requirements. Senator Carl Levin, Ms Bean’s former boss as chair of the PSI, repeatedly sought to bring in transparency legislation at federal level, without success. President Obama supported the proposals while a senator for Illinois but progress has stalled during his administration; might that have something to do with the fact that Vice President Joe Biden is ex-senator for Delaware? Merely an observation. Currently, in a fresh attempt, the Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act, is grinding its early way through Congress [1]; the Panama Papers must certainly improve its prospects, but no more. “I’m a little jaded by now,” Ms Bean admitted to MLB, though she took heart from Director of FinCEN Jennifer Shasky Calvery’s statement, earlier at the same conference, that beneficial ownership was her number one priority. But Ms Shasky Calvery is leaving the agency at the end of May 2016 to take up a post at HSBC so whether her successor will be equally seized of the issue is moot.