This article was originally published in the Morning Consult

Drafting legislation is sometimes compared to making sausage. It’s not a pretty process. Yet the end result can be productive if not delicious. It depends in large part on what is stuffed into the casing.

The House Financial Services Committee is in the process of grinding sausage – this month they are marking up legislation dealing with anonymous shell companies and other anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist finance controls.

The process has included a number of compromises and watered-down ingredients. Unfortunately, there is now a very real chance that the most important feature – a commonsense proposal to control anonymous shell companies by mandating the disclosure of beneficial ownership information – may be stripped entirely, leaving a proposed bill that would be worse than the status quo.

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

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John A. Cassara is a former U.S. intelligence officer and Treasury special agent who has written four books on money laundering and terror finance.

This article was originally published in the Morning Consult