We have a small LLC and had to comply, but there are a lot of exceptions. Be sure to check the exceptions to see if you have to register.
This is happening because of the passage of a transparency law (I think it passed in 2021) but despite the hard deadline of Jan 1 2025 I'm not sure how many people know about this.
The government simply wants to know that there are real people (beneficial owners) behind these LLCs because there are so many of them that are fake shell companies and what not that are used for money laundering and illicit purposes.
You can either file it on line (in real time) or if you have a particular type of Adobe Acrobat program you can fill it out as a PDF at your leisure and submit it after you have all the information ready to go.
They want to know basic information like an LLC's EIN #, address and addresses of the Beneficial Owners, and the names, D.O.B. and addresses of the beneficial owners (persons with a 25% or greater interest/share in the company).
The hardest part for me, because I'm technologically challenged, is they want photographs of one official document for each BO. In our case, we used our state issued driver's licenses. You may be very adept at this, but I barely knew what I was doing. So, our LLC had 4 beneficial owners. We took photos of our drivers licenses, edited them down in file size so they would be acceptable to the form, and uploaded them for each BO.
I'd say it probably took me a little over an hour, but I sort of prepped by familiarizing myself with the data they wanted and getting everything together in advance. The fewer Beneficial Owners you have, the less time this process will take.
But you can study the form in advance on the website and see if you have all the info or whether you need to dig around to find some of it (like your EIN number, DL numbers or DOBs of your Beneficial Owners, for example).
I really do wish you luck. It's not cool that so many of us are just finding out about this now. Our lawyer told us he thought they might extend the deadline because so many people are just finding out about it now and are panicking--and with the holidays coming up and so forth.
One word of caution: Be sure to go to the actual government website. There are a bunch of fly by night websites and lawyers charging people to do something that is free. Most of them are honest in the sense that they will file your BOI with the government after you fill it out on their websites but they charge various fees, from the high hundreds to the $350 range as a filing fee. It takes just the same amount of time to fill the official government form out for yourself and the government does not charge you anything. (Also the government website is quite good).
After you file it, you receive an onscreen message telling you that your submission was successful. You will be assigned a FinCen number and you can download a transcript of your submission so you have proof you complied by the deadline. They will also send you a confirmation by email.
I really hope this helps you and maybe others. It is a little bit anxiety-provoking, but I think when most people see the form they will not find anything too surprising.
LLCs and companies created before January of 2024 do not have to fill out Part II, asking for information about the original applicant. (There are pretty good instructions on the form).
I hope I haven't forgotten anything important.
Here's the official link:
https://boiefiling.fincen.gov/
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