Contents of FinCEN Reports Required by the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA)

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) provides that all “reporting companies” must file a report with the Financial Criminal Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the U.S. Treasury that discloses information or be subject to a $500/day fine.  If your company is a reporting company then it must file a FinCEN report that contains the following information about each of its “beneficial owners” and the person called the “applicant.”  See “Who Must File a FinCEN Report?“

A beneficial owner is an individual who, directly or indirectly, through any contract, arrangement, understanding, relationship, or otherwise (i) exercises substantial control over the entity; or (ii) owns or controls not less than 25 percent of the ownership interests of the entity.  An applicant is the person who filed the reporting company’s formation document with the state agency of the state in which the entity was formed.

The FinCEN report must contain the following information about each beneficial owner and applicant:

  • the person’s full legal name;
  • the person’s date of birth;
  • the person’s residential or business street address as of the date on which the FinCEN report is delivered;
  • a unique identifying number from the person’s (i) nonexpired passport issued by the United States, (ii) nonexpired identification document issued by a State, local government, or Indian Tribe to the individual acting for the purpose of identification of that individual, (iii) a nonexpired driver’s license issued by a State, or (iv) a nonexpired passport issued by a foreign government if the person does not have a document described in subparagraph (i), (ii), or (iii).
  • a picture of the person’s document from which the unique identifying number was obtained.

In lieu of entering the above information in a FinCEN report the reporting company can report the FinCEN identifier FinCEN issued to the the person if that person submitted the above information to FinCEN and FinCEN issued the person a FinCEN identifier.