I think I'm going to like this thread. It's a great place to discuss without needing to tie it to a political party. Also it's random anybody can post stuff that is tangential to politics.
So, FinCen. Fincen was created under a bank secrecy act as a tool to stop dirty money from entering the US and being laundered and then sent back to the criminals, free and clear of legal constraints. It requires banks and other financial institutions to report when they receive large sums of offshore money and that reporting system is called FinCen. It was rather toothless because the agency that reported those transactions fulfilled all legal requirements after they reported the transaction. It was like, hey, "I got a huge pile of cash that was dripping with blood. I reported it, so, you go ahead and do what you like with this report. I'll just move along and clean it up for my client now." But that's ending this year.
In 2021, Congress enacted legislation that created the Beneficial Ownership rule. Trump blocked it during his final days and Biden finally got those blocks removed during the last months of 2022. In that rule, corporations, banks, real estate companies, investment agencies and other places of business in the US that receive money from an offshore investor must identify the individual who owns the money they receive. Before then, linking the money to somebody who didn't want to be identified (Putin, for example) could create any number of shell companies that would be reported as the owner in FinCen, putting the burden of discovering if the money was most likely dirty on the government. It was like playing whack a mole.
Under the new act and rules, going forward, the responsibility for identifying and flagging incoming dirty money will fall on the institution in the US that receives the money.
Who lobbied against it? The Queen of England did. US realtors. US banks. The National Association of Home Builders. Of course, Trump.
Written last year, this article chronicles how dirty money has entered into the US and why this new regulation will help stop it. Dirty money was the source of power for Donald Trump and propelled him to the WH. Stopping it from flowing into the US is as important as cleaning up sources of environmental pollution.
As G7 nations try to keep illicit money out of their financial systems, private real estate investors remain ripe for exploitation.
therealdeal.com
Wash, rinse, repeat: How money launderers exploit real estate
Property investment is a common way to clean dirty cash, but watchdogs aren’t giving up