Newsroom/Regulation

No US registry to lean on: beneficial ownership is back on your desk

FinCEN's final rule under the Corporate Transparency Act took effect on 14 August 2026 and permanently removed beneficial ownership reporting for US companies and US persons. Only certain foreign entities registered to do business in the United States remain in scope. For compliance teams the headline is not less paperwork. It is that for most US counterparties, there is no longer a federal filing that will hand you the real owner.

OCT 14, 2026 · 2 MIN READ · BY THE KYCK DESK

What changed, and what did not

An interim rule had already exempted US companies in March 2025; the August 2026 final rule made that permanent. Foreign companies registered to do business in a US state still report, but not their US owners. The detail of the rule is in our article on the FinCEN final rule.

What it means for your counterparty file

• You cannot cite a government filing as your ownership evidence for a US entity.
• Finding the beneficial owner becomes a due diligence exercise again, not a lookup.
• US entities owned through foreign layers get harder to unwind, not easier.
• Your file has to show how you established ownership: the documents, the declarations and who checked them.

Registries open and close with politics. The question the file has to answer does not: who owns this company, who controls it, and can you prove it.

How KYCK handles it

KYCK maps ownership from the documents and declarations the counterparty provides, through every holding layer to the ultimate beneficial owners, and screens each person and company found for sanctions, PEP and adverse media. The evidence of how ownership was established stays in the file, timestamped, for the day someone asks. See KYB software and KYB vs KYC.

Sources

• FinCEN: Beneficial Ownership Information

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