Carl Levin

The immediate internal threat of Taliban extremism was greater than any external threat.

If Pakistan makes the fight against extremists their own fight, then we ought to be willing to help Pakistan achieve a more stable and secure future.

Unless Pakistan's leaders, both civilian and military, commit in deeds and words to eliminating the threat from militant extremists...

These are damn good witnesses.

There was an IG report in July 2009, a Social Security Administration IG report, that found that the number of SSI redeterminations conducted over a 6-year period from 2003 to 2008 had dropped by more than 60 percent.

The law enforcement community, very much supports this bill and wants to avoid an unfunded mandate

This legislation, which is the result of work done by Senator Levin's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), seeks to increase the transparency of business formation practices as a way to reduce what is estimated as billions of…

The beneficial owner standard in FATF has been there for 20 years, by the way.

The bill does not change State law. It adopts a Federal requirement that the States ask the question on the incorporation form about beneficial ownership.

That is not even a close question. It should be in the United States.

So like the company that Senator Carper mentioned that is listed on the stock exchange with a securities commission, they would be exempted from this bill.

Informing suspects of active U.S. law enforcement investigations is not a good way to thwart or punish crime.

Introducing this legislation, Mr. Chairman, was not our first choice.

Senator Levin's bill offers one solution to this problem, which is to set a national minimum standard for State incorporation practices that require States to collect, maintain and update so-called beneficial ownership information.

Are you suggesting that under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, given what corporations do across boundaries of States, we do not have the jurisdiction in Congress to require States to ask the question on their incorporation…

It is imperative that not be the case here.

The Department strongly supports any Federal legislation that would bring transparency to this area.

My time is up, but I would just say that we ask banks all the time for who the beneficial owners of accounts are, and they provide that information to us.

The very requirement of having someone state beneficial ownership is important because it brings an aspect of daylight onto the activities of these criminal corporate entities.

You make no reference to beneficial owner in your proposal at all, do you?

Instead of collecting beneficial ownership information at the time that a new corporation is being formed in the United States, as our bill does, the NCCUSL proposal would allow hidden persons to obtain a U.S. corporation, misuse it, and…

How can we possibly justify our failure to do what we have committed to do: Obtain beneficial ownership information for the corporations formed within the United States?

Finally, because I'm over my time, Mr. Blum, do you have a comment on the tipoff issue?

So they could identify a shell corporation in Panama or someplace as the record owner of that company?

I wonder if the Justice Department could just quickly say, don't we ask banks for beneficial owners?