Corporate Ownership Transparency

At least in India all corporate entities are public data. All the financial reports are to be made public to the ministry and anyone can request a copy at the payment of a small fee. Oh, and all directorships, holdings subsidiaries are public btw and only two levels of hierarchy are allowed. No shell companies with anonymous owners or layers of companies.

Privacy, there’s no need for this information to be public.You could already sue the anonymous shell company if you wanted to.

Companies aren't anonymous in the US. Corporations must have registered agents in each state in which the corporation is registered, the name and address of whom is public in order to facilitate service of process. LLCs in most states must include at least one member, manager, organizer, or authorized individual in the public filing, and even in states that don't require this, a bank will want it in the public paperwork before opening an account in the LLC's name.

That looks like it requires disclosure of the owners to the US government, not on the public record. If I'm misunderstanding the documents you linked, please let me know.

You're doing business with a corporation - it's a legal person after all. There are reporting requirements etc so you can check all you need about that corporation very precisely. You don't need to know the owners at all. It's not like you can know with US/EU corps - go check and see how many paper trails end in Virgin Islands numbered corporations ;-)

Aren't all corporations listed in a public registry where it's easy to verify?

At least they should still report the name and company. The home address is too much perhaps, but owning a company IMHO seems like public Information.

Regardless of opinions, you can't know the owners of many corporations today. Are you sure you're not doing business with businesses that have owners hidden behind Virgin Islands numbered shares? I wouldn't be, it's actually very common. And if you're actually doing business with them - where's the problem?

Is it not public in the US who owns a company?

> This is information is already on file in tons of places, so the requirement is asinineer, no it isn't, at least some states let you create fairly anonymous companies where the state has no idea of the actual owner of the company, and the lawyers who created it might not either.