This article was originally published in The Hill.

Though it may seem fanciful, there is a powerful tool that is tailor made for simultaneously combating North Korean nukes, Russian aggression, Chinese influence, and Iranian maleficence. This tool is beneficial ownership. In practice, existing beneficial ownership rules in the United States require compliance departments to collect, verify, and store data on clients, all at a cost to the consumer.

Proposed legislation preserves privacy, but requires businesses to submit and maintain basic information about ownership structures at the federal or state level, allowing better communication between the private sector and national security agencies. Almost all sanctions legislation has beneficial ownership language in it. Passing a general beneficial ownership law will give U.S. sanctions the teeth they need to truly deter the authoritarian scourge from entering our system.

Continue reading: the full op-ed can be found here.

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Clay R. Fuller is a Jeane Kirkpatrick research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article was originally published in The Hill.