Corporate Transparency Act Is Constitutional, Feds Maintain

The US Constitution’s commerce clause allows the federal government to gather beneficial ownership information for millions of American businesses, it told a federal appeals court.

The Corporate Transparency Act “falls well within Congress’s commerce power,” because it “regulates business entities in order to prevent certain anonymous economic transactions,” the Department of Justice brief to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit says.

Plaintiffs seeking to stop the Act “come nowhere near showing” it to be unconstitutional, DOJ said.

The CTA requires 32 million American businesses to report information in their beneficial owners to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. ...