Corporate Transparency Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. BROWN of Maryland. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I want to thank my colleague from California, the chairwoman of the committee, Chairwoman Waters, for her leadership on the Financial Services Committee. And I want to recognize the hard work of my colleague and friend from New York, Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney, on the underlying bill. I also want to thank you, Representative Maloney, for inviting me last Congress to visit several European countries to explore and better understand how those countries address the problems that this bill seeks to address.

Currently, no state requires companies to provide the identities of their true beneficial owners. This lack of oversight and transparency makes it easy for criminals, dictators, and kleptocrats to launder money, hide their illicit activities, and invade law enforcement through anonymous shell companies.

These anonymous shell companies can be used for everything from funding terrorist organizations, supporting human traffickers, and helping corrupt foreign leaders evade sanctions and threaten our national security. These so-called companies have no employees, no physical offices but are established simply to access our banking system.

The 2016 Panama Papers leak exposed just how powerful and corrupt these anonymous shell companies are. And the United States is the only advanced economy in the world that doesn't already require this disclosure. To combat this, this bill requires corporations to disclose their beneficial owners at the time the company is formed. This is a commonsense requirement, considering you often need more documentation to get a library card than to start a company or an LLC.

This bill provides much needed transparency without being burdensome on legitimate businesses. The bill also protects the privacy of Americans by ensuring law enforcement officials at the State and Federal level with access to this new information are properly trained, have an existing investigatory basis before searching, and maintain an audit log.

Mr. Chair, my amendment strengthens and builds upon these protections. It requires law enforcement officials tasked with handling a beneficial owner's personal information to go through retraining at a minimum of every 2 years. This will ensure they are keeping up with the latest rules, systems, and processes and will lower the risk of misuse or improper disclosure.

The retraining is critical to ensuring that our law enforcement officials, at all levels of government, are undertaking best practices when handling sensitive information during their investigations. Together we can finally tackle the issues surrounding shell companies and their opaque beneficial ownership structure and give law enforcement the tools they need to track the money that threatens our national security.

I strongly encourage my colleagues to support the underlying bill and my amendment. I yield back the balance of my time

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