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Writer's pictureThe Digital Economist

Beneficial Ownership Transparency

Updated: Jul 19, 2023



Beneficial ownership transparency (BOT) is the sunlight that the global transparency and anti-corruption movement brings to the darkness of crime, tax abuse, regulatory arbitrage, and outright regulation-dodging.

BOT enables nations to follow the money—opaque and illicit financial flows—to identify the secretive individuals who ultimately benefit from those transactions (beneficial owners).

BOT has the potential to dramatically increase the quality of governmental anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) activities. With state-of-the-art BOT technology tools, public officials will be better able to identify and tax those shifted profits and the income earned on hidden wealth. This will place authorities in a position to require owners of that wealth to comply with environmental, labor and public health regulations, and to impose criminal penalties where appropriate.

Unfortunately, BOT in its current state—pursuing transparency without cutting-edge technology—is simply not up to the job, despite successes on the political front and key agreements forged.


Tech for Transparency aims to upgrade BOT and enable nations to recover up to half a trillion US dollars each year—which could constitute a healthy down payment toward financing achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals—by marrying the world’s most effective transparency and anti-corruption activism with its most transformative digital science.


This is the goal of the financial transparency movement, and it is no pipe dream. For the first time, we possess both the political will and the critical technology. In this Tech for Transparency collaboration of data science and activism, we aim to create and deploy trailblazing open-source digital infrastructure that will actualize the full global potential of financial transparency.


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