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After facing court challenges the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act, has gone into effect, requiring many owners of corporations, limited liability companies and sole proprietors to report beneficial ownership information (BOI) to the federal government.
But loopholes in the act have inadvertently made churches the ideal venue for international money laundering.
In prior years, law enforcement would complain about the difficulty of identifying the owners of companies because their names didn’t appear on corporate records.
For some companies, the only contact is a registered agent who doesn’t personally know their client. On other occasions the names of managers of limited liability companies (LLCs) and dummy directors of corporations appear on company registration documents rather than the owner.
This lack of corporate transparency protects terrorists, international money laundering, tax evasion, and drug smuggling.
Lack of Beneficial Ownership Hides Aircraft
When reporters Mark Smith and Tanya Eiserer of Dallas-based ABC affiliate WFAA discovered in 2019 that more than 1,000 aircraft were registered to two P.O. boxes in the small Texas town of Onalaska – which has no airport – they began to ask questions. It was, after all, more aircraft than are registered in either Seattle, San Antonio or New York City.
WFAA reported, “In 2008, a plane crashed into a home in Caracas, Venezuela, killing seven people. The pilot was a twice-convicted drug smuggler. The plane was registered in the United States to Aircraft Guaranty Corp. The company never identified the real owner.”
“There’s more: In 2013, a helicopter also registered to Aircraft Guaranty crashed into a golf course in Mexico. ‘I was never able to find out the actual person who was responsible for that helicopter accident,’ said attorney Ladd Sanger, who represented the families of three of the five people killed in the crash.”
