No, it will force small businesses in a handful of states to provide their beneficial owners, as they already do in most states and when opening bank accounts nationwide.

Probably a dumb question, but are the disclosures only available to the government (federal?), or will the disclosures be available to the general public (and litigious lawyers) too?

Government only.

I can find nothing in the bill that guarantees this, nor provides for any penalty for unauthorized disclosure. Am I missing something you can direct me to?

I can state that in practice, in attempting to social engineer my own legally protected information from banks and local government I have had nearly 100% success rate in obtaining it. The only solution is to not give them access to the data in the first place.

If this information is available 'only to law enforcement' as some have suggested here, that often means that essentially any law enforcement anywhere in the country for any reason. If you don't know someone who can look up tags for you, or addresses off drivers licenses ... you need to get out more. That level of protection is better than nothing, but it isn't particularly protected.

Yes, it keeps randoms out. Be careful asking friends in law enforcement to look something up for you. Requests are logged. And if another law enforcement group has an alert set, you will get a visit asking why you were asking.

Small businesses are usually LLC. This will most likely target C-Corps than anything else. But yes, this will make life hard for anyone running a remote C-Corp and does not have enough revenue to be "legitimate". This also will inflate costs for small businesses running legitimate operations: Rent will go up, Harder to recruit people and Less profit or no profit. I lived near a place like this. It was impossible to run a profitable coffee-shop or restaurant because there was lots of competition, little customers and sky-high rent costs. It seemed like 90% of the activity right there was simply fake or driven by the money laundering economy.

None of what you said seems to follow from what is explained in the comments above or the article. From my reading, literally all the small business has to do to be “legitimate” is to accurately disclose the beneficial owners’ names, addresses and a Government issued ID (which I assume can be foreign for foreign owners as long as it can be verified).

There’s nothing about not being allowed to have an anonymous shell company that inflates the costs of legitimate business...

> literally all the small business has to do to be

These are the most dangerous words ever. Especially that this requirement is probably ineffective. It is a small paperwork, yes, but it is there. A couple years later, it is reviewed and judged to be ineffective and new requirements are added to this paperwork.

Then we end up with hundreds of paperwork to fill and submit just to be able to run a business.

> This also will inflate costs for small businesses running legitimate operations

It's inherently obvious you didn't read the article at all. None of what you state is true. Just do yourself a favor and read the article.

That's my worry, too. For my 3 person consulting business we already have to spend about 8 hours a week on "compliance".