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#13379313 at 2021-04-07 19:53:42 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #16949: #StopDCStateHood Edition

FinCEN Begins Making Rules For Corporate Transparency Act

The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) asked last week for the public to comment on a series of questions about the new beneficial ownership reporting requirements of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), according to an Advance Notice of Public Rulemaking (ANPR).

FinCEN.svgFinCENThe act targeted financial crimes like money laundering and terrorist financing by requiring corporations and limited liability companies to report details about their beneficial owners and thus, ending the anonymity of malign actors perpetrating these crimes.

"The ability to engage in activity and obtain financial services in the name of a legal entity without disclosing the identities of the natural persons who own or control the entity-the natural persons whose interests the legal entity most directly serves-enables those natural persons to conceal their interests," the ANPR said.

"As FinCEN has previously highlighted, such concealment 'facilitates crime, threatens national security, and jeopardizes the integrity of the financial system,'" it said.?

Changes in these regulations comes after an international outcry to crack down on anonymous shell companies. Led by ICIJ and Buzzfeed News, the OCCRP and several other outlets published in 2020 the FinCEN files, exposing the role of financial institutions in wide-scale money laundering. In December, more than 20 international organizations called on the United Nations to crackdown on anonymous shell companies.

The rulemaking process allows for the public to have a say in the regulations created to enforce the act. The ANPR asked the public to answer a range of questions pertaining to the CTA including how to define key terms, suggestions on reporting procedures and what type of information should go into reports.

Beneficial ownership information will be organized into a non-public database maintained by FinCEN and available to law enforcement and financial institutions bound by customer due diligence as long as they have the consent of the customer, according to the act.

Experts like Jim Richards, founder of RegTech consulting who has 20 years of experience in financial crimes, delivered praise for the new regulations with a healthy dose of skepticism. One of the stated goals of the CTA is to facilitate the sharing of information with the goal of curbing financial crime, but Richards questioned the effectiveness of a database as it is lined out so far in a recent article he wrote for RegTech.

"Financial institutions' access to the database is severely restricted, and the punishing requirements imposed on federal, State, and Tribal government agencies to gain access to the information in the database may dissuade many of them from using it at all," Richards said.

He also raised concerns about possible loopholes in the CTA, specifically when it comes to reporting exceptions for companies he refers to as "tall, dark, and handsome"- corporations or llcs which have a minimum of 20 employees, US$5 million in revenue and a physical office in the U.S.

Theoretically, by creating the right kind of facade criminals could create a corporation which would not be required to report its beneficial owner under the CTA.

Nothing is set in stone yet, the public is allowed and "strongly encouraged" to submit comments on the rules through May 5, 2021, according to FinCEN. The new rules which will enforce the actions required by the CTA must be finalized by January 1, 2022.

https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/14186-fincen-begins-making-rules-for-corporate-transparency-act

#8710958 at 2020-04-07 05:00:23 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #11153: We became divided. We became weak. Edition

Truck drivers make it possible for everyone else to work from home

Chet Eby is making sure you are going to get all of the bacon you need for breakfast, or maple-glazed ham for that now-modified family Easter dinner you are going to make, or that thinly sliced prosciutto and provolone sandwich you've been craving. It is a Wednesday afternoon, and the 31-year-old has his young sons, Austin and Evan, with him hauling a load of piglets from Cumberland County to Iowa, one of millions of road warriors behind the wheel of a truck traveling across the country every hour of every day making sure the food and necessities you need and enjoy are available at your local grocers. "I am hauling baby pigs from where they're born in Pennsylvania to the farms where they fatten them out in Iowa," he said from his starting point. He is heading out to Iowa with his truck filled with 20-pound pigs. "So on our end of it with farmers, every eight weeks a new litter of pigs is born and we have to get the little ones out of the barn, the barn needs to be empty so the next batch can come." "If we don't transport freight, the country comes to a standstill," Eby says matter-of-factly. Pigs have to go somewhere to fatten. From there they are processed and delivered to grocery stores and butcher shops in refrigerated trucks all over the country. That is where KLLM Transport Services out of Jackson, Mississippi, comes in, whose core business is in refrigerated transportation. "We have about 4,000 tractor-trailers nationwide with about 25 locations across the country," said Jim Richards, CEO of KLLM. And they haven't stopped moving.

There are over 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States, according to the American Trucking Associations, who deliver billions of tons of freight from one place to the other every year. In the weeks since the coronavirus has spread across the country, KLLM truckers are the men and women who are making sure perishable foods and pharmaceuticals are delivered across the lower 48 states and Mexico, never stopping or slowing down your ability to get what you need - despite all of the barriers, restrictions, and complications of the coronavirus.

Richards was hired by the company straight out of college for their management training program, which included him getting a commercial driver license and driving across the country with a load. As a future manager, he deeply understood what the life of trucking and hauling meant. Now, he says the biggest change is people not working in the office. "We've never been one that allowed very many of our employees to work remotely. And so, thank goodness that we are a very technology forward-thinking company. And that's really what has saved us," he said. Each truck has satellite two-way communication, Richards explained. "The technology that we employ, both from a communications perspective on the trucks, as well as location, and also safety has really been a benefit for us during this time," he said. "Obviously we'd never foresee anything like that. But it enabled us to continue to operate. And our non-driving staff, which we have never been allowed to work remotely, for the most part, we've got about 95% of them all working from home," Richards explained.

Truckers have become a new wave of front line responders in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic - starting with Eby, who gets the piglet to the farm to be fattened, and the next driver who gets the fattened pig to the butcher, and the next one who gets the refrigerated meat to the store. Before the realities of this pandemic, trucks were often ignored. Their impact on our daily lives was considered an annoyance, as they chugged slowly up the winding hills of our back roads on the way to that grocery store, hospital, department store, or Amazon distribution center. Never mind that they are filled with those essential things we have to have or nonessential things we thought we had to have. Too often, people mindlessly assume what they buy at Target or Walmart or Whole Foods comes from the back room, not from a farm upstate, or a factory four states away.

"I'm glad that our industry is finally getting a little bit of a positive spin," said Richards, "So many times, you run up and down the highways and all you see is plaintiff attorneys advertising, wanting to sue truckers."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/truck-drivers-make-it-possible-for-everyone-else-to-work-from-home

#6860261 at 2019-06-28 00:56:23 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #8774: [OnReady] Edition

>>6860163
>Jim Richards, a longtime House Democratic staffer, died this week

Washington State House, not US Congress.

https://housedemocrats.wa.gov/contact-page/hdc-staff/

#6860163 at 2019-06-28 00:47:03 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #8774: [OnReady] Edition

House Democratic staffer dies after suffering heart attack

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) - Jim Richards, a longtime House Democratic staffer, died this week after suffering a heart attack over the weekend.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/House-Democratic-staff-dies-after-suffering-heart-14057117.php

#4961220 at 2019-01-30 06:00:15 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #6334:He Who Smollet Dealt It Edition

>>4961200
Read some Jim Richards.