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Introducing a new "inside the government thread" where I will be chronicling any kind of day-to-day observations I find interesting at my work.

For those who don't know me, I'm a civil servant that works for a large financial center. I do policy and legislation and so I'm faced with implementing global standards on a day-to-day basis.

I'm always open to do podcasts, but unfortunately, I just don't have the contacts in that space. So I'm just going to chronicle things I see here.

OpnState 7mo ago

Sufficient links.

So the financial action task force, and by now I hope everyone here knows what that is, recently dictated to my government that it has to maintain a centralized database of the beneficial ownership information of all entities with sufficient links to the jurisdiction.

Oh, and this isn't just my jurisdiction. This is yours too. This is what your government is currently working on.

Anyways, aside from the fact that there will be a centralized database of who owns every trust, corporation, business, holding company - any legal vehicle, We are now, as a jurisdiction, scratching our heads, wondering what the hell the term sufficient links means.

Does anyone with a bank account in a local bank have sufficient links? How about real estate? If you own a house in my country, do you have a sufficient link to my jurisdiction? What if you do a large amount of business in my country? Do you have sufficient links?

What we're trying to determine here is who should be included in that centralized database of beneficial ownership information.

Beneficial ownership really means who the fuck really owns an entity. It strips down the anonymity of artificial entities like trust or corporations.

That's how the FATF works. It puts in place requirements that countries have to follow, but it doesn't define them or clearly outline what the terms mean. So now every country in the world is scratching its head trying to figure out who should be included in the centralized database or who has sufficient links to the jurisdiction.

What does this mean for you? Well, depending on how jurisdictions interpret the term, it could mean that if you do any kind of business in a country, your name and the fact that you did this business will be recorded in a centralized database.

If you were to ask me why this is being put in place I would suggest that this is a first step in a centralized database of all assets and who owns them within a certain country. You have to start by knowing who owns the companies and the trusts and the legal vehicles and then you identify what assets they hold.

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