The facts
The complaint, filed Oct. 27, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, Eugene Division, is State of Oregon v. Bessent, Case No. 6:26-cv-2359. The defendants are Scott Bessent, in his official capacity as Secretary of the Treasury, the Treasury Department, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and other federal officials.
In 2021, Congress enacted the Corporate Transparency Act in response to a problem that has long plagued law enforcement and tax administration: secretive shell corporations, arranged in complex, layered structures designed to hide information about the individuals who own or control them. The Act required domestic and foreign companies to report ownership information to the Treasury Department, and FinCEN issued an implementing regulation in 2022 with a January 1, 2024, effective date. Throughout 2024, millions of corporate entities reported information about their owners through the system FinCEN established.
Then, after the change in presidential administrations, FinCEN issued an interim final rule on March 21, 2025, that effectively eliminated the Act's carefully designed reporting system, and finalized the rule on Aug. 14, 2026. The rules exempted all entities formed in the United States from reporting any ownership information, and exempted foreign entities from reporting any information about or from their U.S. owners. According to the Final Exemptions Rule's own estimates, it carves out over 99.9% of the millions of entities that would otherwise be required to report, and FinCEN accomplished that reduction by literally copying statutory text for covered entities into a new regulatory provision for exempted entities.
The Final Exemptions Rule also announced, without any advance warning in the interim rule or any opportunity for public comment, that FinCEN will purge all existing ownership data for newly exempted entities by, at the latest, February 2027. FinCEN had already collected millions of reports under the 2022 rule, including approximately 15 million BOI reports prior to the Interim Exemptions Rule, and the final rule says it plans to delete the information in one "sweep" on or about February 10, 2027. The states call that mass deletion the "Data Purge" and say the final rule contains no discussion of FinCEN's statutory authority to undertake it.
The states ask for a judgment declaring the interim and final rules unlawful and vacating them, and for immediate relief to prevent the destruction of the ownership information Congress directed FinCEN to collect and preserve. They argue the executive branch cannot repeal a law by rulemaking, that Congress did not grant FinCEN power to repeal the Act by exemption or to wipe existing reported data, and that the rules' justifications are conclusory and run counter to the evidence FinCEN had before it.
Our take
This is the most brazen, bureaucratic middle finger to a congressional law you’ll ever see. Scott Bessent’s FinCEN didn’t just gut the Corporate Transparency Act; they took the exact fucking words Congress wrote to define who has to report, slapped them into the ‘exempt’ category, and called it a day. That’s not rulemaking, you absolute cunts, that’s using the law as a fucking stencil for its own obituary. They turned a system designed to expose the cocksuckers hiding behind shell companies into a VIP lounge where the only requirement for entry is existing. Over 99.9% of entities are now excused because the rulebook now says the rulebook doesn’t apply. It’s a regulatory ouroboros, a snake eating its own goddamn tail and shitting out a get-out-of-jail-free card for every shady fuck with a Delaware LLC. The sheer, lazy arrogance of copying and pasting the statute into the exemption is the kind of shit a hungover intern would do, not the United States Treasury. It’s admitting they have no legal argument, so they’re just going to Ctrl+X the whole program and hope nobody notices. But the real kick in the dick is the data purge. After collecting about 15 million ownership reports, these pricks have calmly scheduled a ‘sweep’ for February 10, 2027, to delete it all. They didn’t ask for comment, they didn’t explain their authority, they just booked the industrial shredder like it’s a fucking conference room. ‘The Data Purge’ sounds like a dystopian tech thriller, but it’s just Bessent’s Treasury deciding that evidence of corporate ownership is best kept in a fucking incinerator. Imagine a cop who, after being told to start collecting fingerprints, announces he’s going to wipe the database because he’s decided fingerprints are an undue burden on criminals. That’s what this is. This isn’t a policy shift; it’s a state-sponsored cover-up, a concierge service for money launderers and tax cheats, with a side of evidence destruction. Bessent isn’t a Secretary; he’s a fucking janitor for plutocrats, mopping up their paper trails with a rule so flimsy it’s literally made of the law it’s repealing. The only thing transparent here is the breathtaking bullshit of an executive branch that thinks it can erase a law by deleting the files.
