That looks like it requires disclosure of the owners to the US government, not on the public record. If I'm misunderstanding the documents you linked, please let me know.
You're correct. However, anything that can be disclosed to the US government can always be disclosed to the public, whether by law or by leak[1]. I did say the law makes establishing anonymous LLCs difficult. I didn't say establishing them was impossible.
This should still be fine, especially for LLCs which presumably exist at least conceptually in order to make money. The government has a well-defined, broadly accepted (outside the fringes) interest in knowing who is doing commerce and making money.
Making money completely anonymously, without reporting this to the IRS and state tax authorities, at least in the US as a US citizen, is and should be illegal. But still seems pretty straightforward to stay anonymous on the front end.
> Making money completely anonymously, without reporting this to the IRS and state tax authorities, at least in the US as a US citizen, is and should be illegal. But still seems pretty straightforward to stay anonymous on the front end.
All for-profit companies doing business in the United States have always been required to report to the IRS and state tax authorities. There's never been a way to make money anonymously short of simply not filing with IRS (definitely illegal). This new law doesn't change or improve upon that in any way.
Prior to the bill being passed, one could set up a shell company in Nevada without giving away one's name. With the passage of this bill, one's ownership in an LLC is kept in a registry by a government agency for the sole purpose of surveillance. There's only as much "privacy" from the general public as there is the likelihood that the Treasury's servers are secure. And there's absolutely none from the members of the US government.
There are purposefully installed concessions that were requested by certain entrenched interest groups. For example, a company employing at least 12 people won't have to report anything. And the fact that the bill was a rider on a veto-proof legislation shows the substance of it wasn't quite popular enough to devote a legislative session towards the issue. It's little more than a privacy buster under the guise of an anti-corruption bill.
The 90% use case is that someone wants to make it quite hard for an Internet rando (or maybe their employer) to connect them to their "true name" and, by extension, all the other data connected to their true name--likely including their address among other things, especially if their name is uncommon or other data is already known. This is pretty easy in the US.
Making it so no one can make the connection is much harder (as in close to impossible) and probably illegal in many cases especially if money is changing hands.
