LANSING, Mich. — Michigan has signed on to a multistate lawsuit that seeks to restore federal rules forcing companies to disclose who really owns them, Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Thursday.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia filed the case Oct. 27 against the U.S. Treasury Department and its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN. They are challenging a 2025 interim rule and a 2026 final rule that exempt businesses formed in the United States from reporting their owners and let foreign companies skip reporting their U.S. owners.
The reporting requirement comes from the Corporate Transparency Act, a 2021 law passed with support from both parties. It set up a Treasury database of business owners that investigators can use to follow suspicious money, recover stolen assets and uncover bribery.
According to the states, the new exemptions remove more than 99.9% of the companies that would otherwise have had to file. FinCEN has also said it will delete ownership information already submitted by exempted companies by February 2027. Nessel’s office says those records likely contain evidence tied to unsolved crimes.
The complaint argues FinCEN went beyond what Congress allowed, broke the Administrative Procedure Act, gave thin explanations for reversing its earlier findings and failed to consult the Homeland Security secretary and the U.S. attorney general. The states also say the planned purge was announced without a public comment period and conflicts with federal record-keeping law.
The states want a judge to throw out the rules, keep the database running for law enforcement and bar FinCEN from deleting stored records while the case is pending. Nessel said Washington cannot sidestep a law it no longer wants to enforce. Businesses may want to watch the case, since a ruling could change what they must report.
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