Every year, financial institutions spend billions of dollars to prevent and detect money laundering. Such efforts can debilitate those engaged in organized crime, terror financing, human trafficking, kleptocracy, and other offenses, and thwart those seeking to avoid sanctions.

Yet those efforts are often frustrated in the United States, as our laws currently allow criminals to hide behind a corporate veil by keeping their ownership secret from law enforcement, national security, and banks tasked with doing due diligence on their clients.