Effective January 1, 2024, virtually all new companies being incorporated in the United States will need to “comply with the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA),” the team at Carta noted.
As explained in a blog post by Carta, this new law will “require them to submit an initial filing regarding the company’s beneficial ownership within 90 days of incorporation, and make mandatory updates as the company’s ownership and governance structures evolve.”
Companies must submit these filings “to FinCEN, a division of the U.S. Treasury Department.”
While the aim of this legislation is anti-money-laundering (AML)—to “identify corporate shells used for illicit purposes—millions of legitimate businesses will be subject to the CTA’s disclosure regime.”
For the law’s first year in effect, the regulations “will only apply to the newest companies, meaning those with the fewest resources and the least sophisticated compliance programs will be the first required to file.”
Carta is helping founders comply by “offering a free CTA compliance solution as soon as the new regulations go into effect on January 1, 2024.”
The CTA compliance solution is “embedded in Carta’s free Launch plan, so startups (and their counsel) can use it even if the company has not raised any financing.”
CTA compliance on Carta has “been designed for ease-of-use, leveraging ownership data that’s already collected during the Launch onboarding process to populate the CTA filing.”
Carta’s KYC/AML technology “allows for easy, secure collection of any additional pieces of data (e.g. photos of government IDs) that may be required from your company’s beneficial owners prior to submission.”
Through Carta Launch, they’ve “helped over 10,000 companies get started. Collectively, they’ve raised over $23B and built over $135B in market value.”
They combined this experience “helping founders with deep private-markets policy expertise, to create a simple and easy CTA compliance workflow.”
They then refined their CTA compliance solution “with input from over 50 leading law firms, who collectively work with tens of thousands of startups on Carta.”
As their product team built the solution in Launch, Carta’s Policy Team “led a broad policy coalition to collaborate with FinCEN, push for clarifications to help founders comply, and lobby for the government to provide API docs to streamline submission of CTA filings.”