Tag Archives: U.S. Treasury Department

How the U.S. Should Tackle Money Laundering in the Real Estate Sector

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It is no secret that foreign kleptocrats and other crooks like to stash their illicit cash in U.S. real estate (see here, here, here and here).  A recent report from Global Financial Integrity (GFI) found that more than US$2.3 billion were laundered through U.S. real estate in the last five years, and half of the reported cases of real estate money laundering (REML) involved so-called politically exposed persons (mainly current or former government officials or their close relatives and associates). The large majority of these cases used a trust, shell company, or other legal entity to attempt to mask the true owner of the property.

Shockingly, the U.S. remains the only G7 country that does not impose anti-money laundering (AML) laws and regulations on real estate professionals. But there are encouraging signs that the U.S. is finally poised to make progress on this issue. With the backing of the Biden Administration, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Criminal Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) that proposes a number of measures and floats different options for tightening AML controls in the real estate sector. The U.S. is thus approaching a critical juncture: the question no longer seems to be whether Treasury will take more aggressive and comprehensive action to address REML; the question is how it will do so. And on that crucial question, I offer three recommendations for what Treasury should—and should not—do when it finalizes its new REML rules:

Continue reading →

The U.S. Qualified Opportunity Zone Program Is Vulnerable to Corrupt Manipulation by Politically-Connected Investors. Here’s How To Fix It.

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The U.S. federal government’s Qualified Opportunity Zones Program, a program established as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, is supposed to drive investment to certain low-income neighborhoods (so-called “qualified opportunity zones,” or QOZs) by allowing investors to defer (or, in the case of sufficiently long-term investments, to avoid) capital gains taxes on their investments in these areas. The process of designating QOZs works as follows: First, the U.S. Department of the Treasury provides each state with a list of eligible “economically distressed” neighborhoods. This list is based on census data, but, importantly, it includes not only neighborhoods located in poor census tracts, but also neighborhoods that are adjacent to poor neighborhoods, or that overlap (even slightly) with areas designated as “empowerment zones” under a Clinton-era redevelopment initiative. Next, each state governor has the authority to nominate up to 25% of these eligible neighborhoods for designation as QOZs. The governors’ lists are then submitted to the Treasury Secretary, who has the final authority to certify these neighborhoods as QOZs. As of July 2020, 8,700 neighborhoods had been designated as QOZs.

Many have questioned the wisdom and efficacy of the QOZ program on a variety of grounds, with some characterizing the program as little more than a new form of tax avoidance for the wealthy that fails to address structural poverty. Even if one puts those concerns to the side, there are serious concerns that the existing QOZ program—and in particular, the process for selecting QOZs described above—has been corrupted by wealthy interests, who are able to exploit their political connections to get certain areas designated as QOZs, even when professional staff deem such designations inconsistent with the established program criteria. Consider just a few high-profile examples: Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Coalition for Integrity’s New Report on How To Ensure Oversight of U.S. Coronavirus Response Funds

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Today’s guest post is by Shruti Shah, the President and CEO of the Coalition for Integrity, a civil society advocacy organization focused on corruption in the United States.

The U.S. Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (the CARES Act), enacted in late March to address the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, provides over $2 trillion in various forms of relief, including over $600 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provides loans to small businesses, and approximately $500 billion in additional discretionary Treasury Department loans. To ensure appropriate allocation of these funds, and to reduce the risks of corruption, fraud, and other forms of misappropriation, transparency and oversight are essential. Indeed, we have already seen the perils of a lack of transparency in awarding the PPP loans. Instead of prioritizing businesses who were in danger of failing without an injection of cash, many large chains and other well-funded companies received loans. Further, there are reports that businesses owned by members of Congress received money under the program, which raises conflict of interest concerns.

Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has resisted even relatively modest measures to assure transparency and accountability in the allocation of CARES Act funds. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin previously announced that the names of PPP recipients would not be made public, making the misguided claim that the identity of PPP loan recipients is the companies’ confidential and proprietary information. But taxpayer have a right to know where their money is going (a principle the U.S. vigorously applies when sending foreign aid dollars overseas). Eventually Secretary Mnuchin relented to pressure to change course, and agreed to provide information regarding PPP loans in excess of $150,000. Yet the administration’s resistance to transparency and oversight has continued, as demonstrated by alarming reports that the Treasury Department’s Office of General Counsel has issued a legal opinion claiming that the Department has no obligation to provide key information to oversight officials, including the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), about the CARES Act’s PPP and discretionary business loan programs.

These reports underscore the importance of keeping up the pressure on Congress and the Administration to take appropriate steps to ensure genuine transparency and accountability in the allocation of pandemic response funds. Congress in particular may need to add new legal provisions to address the flaws in the oversight system. The Coalition for Integrity recently released a new report, entitled Oversight is Better than Hindsight: Anti-Corruption Recommendations for the CARES Act, which documents the current oversight gaps in the CARES Act and presents a set of recommendations on how best to close those gaps. These recommendations include, among others: increasing appropriations for oversight bodies, enacting for-cause removal protections for Inspectors General, enhancing whistleblower protections, requiring the Federal Reserve to comply with Sunshine’s Act meeting transcript or recording requirements, and appointing a chairperson to the Congressional Oversight Commission. The report also highlights a number of measures that the Administration can and should take, including better and more effective cooperation with the oversight bodies, creating a public-facing website with detailed information on contracts awarded under the stimulus program (as was done by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversaw the stimulus funding enacted in response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis), and ensuring more generally that agencies are responsive rather than resistant to requests and recommendations from oversight bodies.

Effective oversight is not a partisan political issue. Misuse of stimulus money will compound the country’s collective misery at a time when millions are already suffering from the grave health and economic effects of the pandemic. In this context, insufficient public transparency and a lack of full cooperation with oversight bodies should worry us all.

 

Are Legislative Changes to US AML Rules Finally on the Way? Some Thoughts on Tomorrow’s Subcommittee Hearing

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Although the United States has been a leader in the fight against global corruption in some respects—particularly in its vigorous enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and, at least until recently, its diplomatic efforts—there is widespread agreement in the anticorruption community that the United States has not done nearly enough to address the flow of dirty money, much of it stolen by kleptocrats and their cronies, to and through the United States. Effectively addressing this problem requires updating the US legislative framework, a task made difficult by the checks and balances built into the federal legislative process, coupled with high levels of political polarization. Yet there are reasons for cautious optimism: Thanks in part to skillful lobbying efforts by several advocacy groups, and aided in part by the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives in the most recent mid-term elections, it looks as if there’s a real chance that the current Congress may enact at least some significant reforms.

Three of the reform bills under consideration are the subject of a hearing to be held tomorrow (Wednesday, March 13, 2019) before the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, International Development, and Monetary Policy. That hearing will consider three draft bills: (1) a draft version of the “Corporate Transparency Act” (CTA); (2) the “Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Rewards Act” (KARRA); and (3) a draft bill that currently bears the unwieldy title “To make reforms of the Federal Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering laws, and for other purposes” (which I’ll refer to as the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) Amendments). The subcommittee’s memo explaining the three proposals is here, and for those who are interested, you can watch a live stream of the subcommittee hearing tomorrow at 2 pm (US East Coast time) here.

For what it’s worth, a few scattered thoughts on each of these proposals: Continue reading →

Ownership Transparency Works: Geographic Targeting Orders in the US Real Estate Market

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The anticorruption community, along with those concerned about tax evasion, fraud, and other forms of illicit activity, has made anonymous company reform a high priority on the reform agenda. It’s not hard to see why: Kleptocrats and their cronies, as well as other organized criminal groups, need to find ways to hide and launder their assets, and to do so in ways that are difficult for law enforcement authorities to trace. Moreover, those whose legitimate sources of income would be insufficient to obtain luxury assets would like to conceal their ownership of such assets, as the ownership itself could arouse suspicion, and might make the assets more vulnerable to forfeiture.

So-called “know-your-customer” (KYC) laws in the financial sector have made it much more difficult—though, alas, far from impossible—for account owners to conceal their identities from the banks and government overseers, at least in the US and most other OECD countries. But it is still far too easy for criminals to purchase substantial assets in wealthy countries like the United States while keeping their identities hidden. All the bad actor needs to do is, first, form a company in a jurisdiction that does not require the true owner of the company to be disclosed and verified to the government authorities, and, second, have this anonymous shell company purchase assets in a transaction that is not covered by KYC laws. Step one is, alas, still far too easy. Though we often associate the formation of these sorts of anonymous shell companies with “offshore” jurisdictions like the British Virgin Islands, in fact one can easily form an anonymous shell company in the United States. Step two, having the anonymous company purchase substantial assets without having to disclose the company’s owner, is a bit trickier, because you’d need to avoid the banking system. But you can get around this problem by having your anonymous company purchase assets with cash (or cash equivalents, like money orders or wire transfers), so long as no party to the transaction is under obligations, similar to those imposed on banks, to verify the company’s true owner.

One of the sectors where we’ve long had good reason to suspect this sort of abuse is common is real estate, especially high-end real estate. Though money laundering experts had long been aware of the problem, the issue got a boost from some great investigative journalism by the New York Times back in 2015. The NYT reporters managed to trace (with great effort, ingenuity, and patience) the true owners of luxury condos in one Manhattan building (the Time Warner Center), and found that a number of units were owned by shady characters who had attempted to conceal their identities by having shell companies make the purchases.

The US still hasn’t managed to pass legislation requiring verification of a company’s true owners as a condition of incorporation, which would be the most comprehensive solution to the anonymous company problem. Nor has the US taken the logical step of extending KYC laws to real estate agents across the board. But starting back in 2016, the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (known as FinCEN) took an important step toward cracking down on anonymous purchases of luxury real estate by issuing so-called Geographic Targeting Orders (GTOs). And thanks to some excellent research by the economists C. Sean Hundtofte and Ville Rantala (still unpublished but available in working paper form), we have strong evidence that many purchasers in the luxury real estate market have a strong interest in concealing their true identities, and that requiring verification of a company’s ultimate beneficial owners has a stunningly large negative effect on the frequency and aggregate magnitude of anonymous cash purchases. Continue reading →

Getting People Off the Sanctions List: A Process that Doesn’t Support the Policy

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Individually-targeted “smart sanctions”—not to be confused with country-wide sanctions, such as trade or arms embargoes—are garnering increased attention as a potentially powerful tool in the anticorruption toolkit, particularly in the United States. Such sanctions typically prohibit persons or entities on the list of those under sanction (known in the U.S. as the Specially Designated and Blocked Person (SDN) list) from accessing the sanctioning country’s financial system. They can also impose travel bans and/or prohibit third parties subject to the sanctioning country’s jurisdiction from doing business with the targeted individuals. These individually-targeted sanctions, particularly the asset freezes, are a powerful instrument, and may be an especially effective deterrent in the context of venal crimes like corruption, given that those motivated principally by greed might also be more sensitive to severe financial penalties. (According to a 2016 study by the US State Department, a sanctioned or associated company loses, on average, over half of its asset value and one-third of its employees and operating revenues.) While the United States had previously used individually-targeted asset freezes to punish individuals responsible for acts of public corruption in places like Venezuela (pursuant to Executive Order (EO) 13692), Syria (pursuant to EO 13460), and Zimbabwe (pursuant to EO 13469), the 2016 Global Magnitsky Act (GMA) has made individually-targeted asset freezes a more prominent piece of the US anticorruption arsenal. Pursuant to this Act, last December President Trump authorized sanctions against 15 individuals and 37 entities for human rights abuses and acts of grand corruption; in June, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) added two more entities and five more individuals to the list.

In the months since OFAC released the first tranche of GMA names, there has been extensive discussion about how civil society organizations (CSOs) can add more names to the Global Magnitsky list. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Rob Berschinski, for example, is spearheading efforts through Human Rights First to coordinate CSOs endeavouring to submit names for consideration, while the Helsinki Commission organized a special “how-to” event for CSOs to help them be more effective in lobbying to add names to the list.

Yet for all this attention on how to get names on to the GMA list, little ink has been spilled addressing the question of how sanctioned individuals might get off that list. It’s not surprising that CSOs would not devote their scarce resources to getting individuals who have engaged in acts of grand corruption off of a sanctions list. Yet the de-listing issue is important—even in contexts where it’s unlikely that a name would be added to the list erroneously. The main reason has to do with incentives. As the US Treasury Department acknowledges, the “ultimate goal with sanctions is not to punish, but to bring about a positive change in behavior of illicit actors.” And it is the prospect of getting off the sanctions list that can encourage bad actors to change their behavior and/or to cooperate with the US government investigations into wrongdoing. Continue reading →

Getting the Right People on the Global Magnitsky Sanctions List: A How-To Guide for Civil Society

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Last December, pursuant to the 2016 Global Magnitsky Act, President Trump issued Executive Order 13818, which declared that “the prevalence and severity of human rights abuse and corruption that have their source, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States … threaten the stability of international political and economic systems,” and authorized the Treasury Secretary to impose sanctions against (among other possible targets) a current or former government official “who is responsible for or complicit in, or has directly or indirectly engaged in: (1) corruption, including the misappropriation of state assets, the expropriation of private assets for personal gain, corruption related to government contracts or the extraction of natural resources, or bribery; or (2) the transfer or the facilitation of the transfer of the proceeds of corruption.” Pursuant to this Executive Order, the Treasury Department imposed powerful economic sanctions against 37 entities and 15 individuals, including Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, and Artem Chaika, the son of Russia’s Prosecutor General.

This was big news, for a couple of reasons. Most obviously, Trump doesn’t exactly have a reputation as a “human rights guy,” let alone a Russia hawk. Given that the 2016 Global Magnitsky Act (unlike its predecessor, the 2009 Magnitsky Act) enables but does not require the imposition of sanctions, it was far from inevitable that the Trump Administration would make use of it. Perhaps just as newsworthy was where the specific names on the list came from: nearly half of those names were provided to the Administration by civil society organizations (CSOs) or by Congress (and in the latter case, it was likely CSO efforts that brought individual names to the attention of Congressional staffers).

The Global Magnitsky Act and EO 13818, then, seem to create promising opportunities for anticorruption CSOs to impose consequences on kleptocrats and their cronies. Because the process is so new, it’s not yet clear how it will develop, yet it is nevertheless useful to draw lessons from the first round of Global Magnitsky sanctions for how CSOs can be maximally effective in using this new tool. The Committee on Security and Cooperation in Europe (also known as the Helsinki Commission) hosted a workshop in early March 2018 to discuss this issue. I was fortunate enough to attend this gathering, and in this post I’ve attempted to distill a handful of key lessons that the participants’ discussion identified. I’ve framed the lessons as a “how-to” guide addressed to members of a hypothetical anticorruption CSO: that would like to take advantage of this powerful tool.

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The U.S. Government’s New Anticorruption Proposals: A Cause for Cynicism, Optimism, or Both?

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Last Thursday, two United States cabinet departments – the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Justice – issued separate but thematically related announcements (see here and here) regarding new initiatives to combat corruption, money laundering, and related malfeasance:

  • Treasury announced the finalization of a new Customer Due Diligence (CDD) rule (discussed previously on this blog), which would require that financial institutions collect and verify the personal information of the beneficial owners of accounts held at those institutions. Treasury also announced a proposal for new regulations that would require certain foreign-owned entities (single-member limited liability companies (LLC)) to obtain a tax ID number and report comply with the associated reporting requirements—a move that would close a loophole that currently allows these entities to shield the foreign owners of non-U.S. assets.
  • Treasury also announced that it plans to send draft legislation to Congress (the text of which does not yet seem to be publicly available) that would require companies to know and report accurate beneficial ownership information at the time of a company’s creation, and to file this information with the Treasury Department.
  • Justice also submitted proposed legislation to Congress that would give the Department new investigative powers (including the use of administrative subpoenas, rather than slower and less flexible grand jury subpoenas, for money laundering investigations, enhanced authority to access foreign bank and business records, and the ability to restrain property based on a request from a foreign country for 90 rather than 30 days). The draft legislation would also creating a mechanism to use and protect classified information in civil asset recovery cases, and would expand the scope of the money laundering offense to include, as a sufficient predicate offense, any violation of foreign law that would be a violation of U.S. law if committed in the United States.

I have not yet had time to review the final CCD rule or the proposed LLC rule, and as I noted above, I don’t think the full text of the legislative proposals is yet available. So I’m not yet in a position to comment on the substance, but at least on the surface, all this seems encouraging. It’s possible to take the cynical view that most of this doesn’t mean very much or represent genuine progress. And I’ll admit part of me is inclined to embrace the cynical view. But on the whole, I do think that last week’s announcements are genuinely encouraging, and signal the possibility of building greater political momentum for real progress.

First, though, the reasons for cynicism: Continue reading →

Transparency International’s Laudable Campaign for Beneficial Ownership Transparency

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As many readers of this blog are likely aware, Transparency International–the leading worldwide anticorruption NGO–has made the corporate secrecy problem a centerpiece of its “Unmask the Corrupt” campaign. TI is focusing in particular on the problem of shell companies whose true (or “beneficial”) owners are unknown, and which can be used by corrupt officials and businesspeople to shelter and launder stolen public funds. The TI Secretariat, along with several of TI’s national chapters, have been pushing for action at both the national and international level, especially for reforms that would make transparent the beneficial owners of these companies. I wanted to use this post as an opportunity to call attention to two of TI’s recent efforts in this area, which might be of interest to GAB readers:

  • First, the TI Secretariat wants to use the G20 leaders’ summit this weekend in Brisbane, Australia as an opportunity to raise awareness of the issue and to put pressure on the G20 leaders to commit to take action on this issue. To this end, TI organized an open letter, signed by a number of prominent civil society activists and other public figures (including John Githongo, Desmond Tutu, and Richard Goldstone), calling on the G20 leaders to outlaw secret company ownership and mandate public registries of the true beneficial owners of all legal entities.
  • Second, as I noted last month, the US government is currently in the midst of a rulemaking process to strengthen due diligence and disclosure requirements on beneficial ownership. TI-USA submitted a set of supportive but critical comments on the rule, urging the US Treasury Department to expand the definition of “beneficial owner” to include individuals who control the entities through means other than a formal management position, to apply the new rules apply to existing accounts as well as new accounts, and to require financial institutions not only to verify the identity of the (alleged) beneficial owner, but to independently verify that the person listed as the beneficial owner is in fact the true beneficial owner.

TI’s efforts in this direction are most welcome, and I hope they have some impact on the G20 summit and the development of new rules in the US (and elsewhere). I’m happy to take this this opportunity to publicize TI’s efforts, and I hope some of our readers out there might be able to contribute to the push that TI and other organizations are making on this issue.

U.S. Treasury Department Is Soliciting Comments on New Anti-Money Laundering Rule

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A quick public service announcement:

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the U.S. Treasury Department is seeking public comments on a proposed rule that is intended to make it harder to hade the proceeds of corruption (or other criminal activities, like drug trafficking) in the U.S. financial system. The full text of the proposed rule is here. That proposed rule is fairly lengthy and complicated (taking up close to 20 pages in the Federal Register, in 3-column small print), but the basic gist of the rule is that it would impose new “know-your-customer” obligations on U.S. financial institutions, and in particular would require banks to identify the “beneficial owner” — the actual person (human person, not corporate person) who benefits from an account owned by an artificial legal entity.

I’m not an expert in this area, but this strikes me as a very good idea. Some supporters, though, have argued that the rule does not go far enough. Global Witness, in a useful post summarizing and discussing the proposed rule, points out some of the deficiencies of the proposed rule, including the fact that although the rule requires financial institutions verify the identify the beneficial owner of an account — that is, to attach the account to a real live human being — the rule does not require banks to independently verify that the listed beneficial owner is in fact the real beneficial owner.

The Treasury Department, following standard procedures under U.S. Administrative law, is seeking pubic comments on the rule. Comments can be submitted in hardcopy, but can also be submitted online. Just go to the regulations.gov site, and in the “search” field type FINCEN-2014-0001. That should take you to the docket, where you can view the rule, read the comments that have already been submitted online (very few so far), and submit any comments of your own.  (A direct link to the docket is here, but I included the above instructions because the direct links to dockets sometimes stop working.) The notice of the proposed rule also lists specific questions and issues that the FinCEN would like commenters to address. Among other things, FinCEN seeks comments on:

  • The proposed definitions of “beneficial owner” and “legal entity customer,” as well as the proposed exemptions (and possible additional exemptions);
  • Whether the rule should apply retroactively to existing accounts, or only to accounts established after the new rule goes into effect;
  • Whether the proposed processes for verification of beneficial owners, updating of beneficial ownership information, and ongoing monitoring of suspicious transactions are sufficiently clear and appropriate.

Comments are due by midnight on October 3rd.