Tag Archives: Project on Government Oversight

Guest Post: The U.S. Just Created a Public Beneficial Ownership Registry for a Subset of Companies

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Today’s guest post is from Neil Gordon, a Senior Researcher at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

Companies with anonymous ownership structures are a serious global problem. Anonymous companies, as readers of this blog are likely well aware, play a significant role in facilitating grand corruption. Anonymous companies are associated with a wide range of other criminal misconduct as well. Unfortunately, the United States bears much of the blame for the proliferation of anonymous shell companies and the harm they cause. Most states make it relatively easy to set up a business without revealing the real owners—even easier than getting a library card, according to the anticorruption think tank Global Financial Integrity. That’s why it was so important that Congress finally enacted two key corporate transparency provisions as part of the fiscal year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The first provision, the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), requires most companies to register their beneficial owners—the people who really own, control, and financially benefit from the company—with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. This provision received a great deal of media coverage, and rightly so. But the second key beneficial ownership transparency provision in the NDAA has received almost no attention, even though it could be a real game-changer. That second provision can be found in Section 885 of the NDAA. Section 885 requires all companies receiving federal contracts or grants over $500,000 to report their beneficial owners in the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS), a database containing the misconduct and performance histories of federal contractors and grantees. Continue reading →

New Podcast, Featuring Danielle Brian

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Danielle Brian, the Executive Director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a U.S. civil society watchdog organization that focuses on investigating, exposing, and preventing government corruption, fraud, and waste, and more broadly lobbies for systemic reforms to improve accountability and integrity in the U.S. government.

The interview begins with a conversation about POGO’s history and current work, and discusses POGO’s somewhat “hybrid model,” which combines investigation work on specific cases with a broader policy reform agenda. Ms. Brian provides, as an encouraging example of how groups like POGO can have a positive impact, POGO’s work in promoting significant reform in the regulations governing payments to oil and gas companies. She describes the case study as a useful illustration of a successful advocacy campaign, but also emphasizes that one of the lessons from this and other cases is that genuine reform takes time and requires patience. We then turn to several other challenges that anticorruption advocacy groups like POGO face, including how to maintain a reputation for nonpartisanship and how to balance the interest in engaging with the government and publicly criticizing the government. Ms. Brian and I also touch on a number of more specific issues, including concerns about corruption in the allocation of coronavirus relief funds, questions about whether or how to frame lobbying or other influence activities as “corrupt,” and the so-called “revolving door” problem.

You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

One other note: KickBack will be going on holiday in August, but we’ll be back with a new episode on September 7.