FinCEN Exempts US Companies from Beneficial Ownership Reporting

On August 14, 2026, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a final rule permanently exempting all US companies and persons from the beneficial ownership reporting requirements of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). The CTA was originally meant to bring millions of US entities into a federal registry of their true owners; now, domestic companies need no longer file. The rule finalizes the interim rule that FinCEN published in March 2025, days after the Treasury Department announced it would stop enforcing the CTA against US citizens and domestic reporting companies.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called this move “a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” while criticism has come from Senator Elizabeth Warren, as well as various observers in the anticorruption space, particularly as FinCEN says it will delete US-person data already submitted. Moving forward, only foreign companies registered in the US remain in scope, and only as to their non-US owners.

By the same token, this decision lands just as another US Government agency gears up to require more ownership diligence. As Ethixbase360 previously covered, in September 2025, the Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) issued the Affiliates Rule, often called the “50% rule,” which automatically extends Entity List restrictions to any company at least 50 percent owned, directly or indirectly, by one or more listed parties. Modeled on a similar rule from the Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Affiliates Rule pushes the burden of tracing ownership onto exporters and their counterparties. The Affiliates Rule was suspended on November 10, 2025, for one year as part of the US-China trade deal.

If the Affiliates Rule snaps back in November 2026, as currently scheduled absent further action, companies will face an asymmetry: greater responsibility to identify who owns their counterparties for sanctions and export controls, even as the US collects and shares less ownership information of its own. Moreover, the Customer Due Diligence rule stays in place, so financial institutions will continue to collect domestic ownership information, and companies still need beneficial ownership information for AML controls, third-party risk management, and more.

Thus for corporate risk teams, collecting beneficial ownership information is no less important; in fact, companies now bear more of the burden for that effort. Companies should consider building their own ownership-mapping capabilities. Whether or not the US Government collects and supplies the information, transparency about who sits on the other side of a transaction remains critical.