Can I look up who owns an LLC?
Not from any public register in the United States, in the general case. Most states never collect beneficial ownership information at all. The Delaware Division of Corporations states in its own FAQ that “Alternative entities are not required to list members and/or managers,” and 6 Del. C. § 18-201(a) requires a certificate of formation to set out only the company’s name, the address of its registered office, and the name and address of its registered agent, plus whatever else the members choose to include. No owner is named anywhere on it. Delaware limited liability companies then pay a $400 annual tax and file no annual report, so the state never receives the information later either.
Some states collect more than Delaware does, and those filings are worth checking first because they are free. California’s Statement of Information, Form LLC-12, is a public biennial filing; Corporations Code § 17702.09(a)(5) requires it to give the name and business or residence address of any manager and of the chief executive officer, if any, or — where no manager has been elected or appointed — of each member. Florida’s annual report must give the name, address and title of each manager or managing member, at least one must be listed, and the address may be a post office box. Read those filings for what they are. A manager holds an office, not necessarily an ownership interest; the person named may be a lawyer, a formation agent, an employee or a nominee; and a post office box is an address in roughly the sense that a registered agent is a person. The document that records who owns the membership interests is the operating agreement, and no state requires an operating agreement to be filed with anyone.
Doesn’t the Corporate Transparency Act let me look up who owns a US company?
No, and the advice fails on two independent grounds rather than one. The beneficial ownership register FinCEN built under the Corporate Transparency Act was never a public lookup. Under 31 U.S.C. § 5336(c), reported information is confidential and may be disclosed only to a closed list of recipients: federal agencies engaged in national security, intelligence or law enforcement activity; state, local and Tribal law enforcement authorised by a court of competent jurisdiction to seek it in a criminal or civil investigation; foreign authorities routed through a federal intermediary; financial institutions with the reporting company’s consent, to facilitate customer due diligence; federal functional regulators; and Treasury officers and employees whose official duties require access, or for tax administration. A civil litigant is not on that list, and neither is a forensic accountant retained by one.
The second ground is that the register no longer reaches US companies at all. FinCEN’s interim final rule of 26 March 2025 redefined “reporting company” to mean only entities formed under the law of a foreign country and registered to do business in a US state or Tribal jurisdiction, and a final rule issued 11 August 2026 and effective 14 August 2026 made those exemptions permanent, including the exemption of US persons from being reported as beneficial owners. New York’s LLC Transparency Act followed the same path for a different reason. It took effect on 1 January 2026, but its key definitions track the federal ones, and Governor Hochul’s veto of S.8432 on 19 December 2025 killed the amendment that would have decoupled them — so the statute now reaches only limited liability companies formed under the law of a foreign country and authorised to do business in New York. What it does collect goes into a secure, non-public database that is not accessible under the Freedom of Information Law; the Department of State may release it by court order, to a government agency where disclosure is necessary to that agency’s official duties, for a valid law enforcement purpose, or with the beneficial owner’s written consent.
Guidance written before 2025 that tells a litigator to search the Corporate Transparency Act register is out of date in one direction and was never right in the other. The register is narrower than it was, and it was never open to private parties in the first place. Court-ordered access to the New York database is the narrow exception worth knowing about, and it is an application, not a search.
If the ownership is not in a public register, where does it actually sit?
With private third parties who were required to collect it and who can be reached with legal process. The bank is usually the best of them. Under the Customer Due Diligence rule at 31 CFR 1010.230, a covered financial institution opening an account for a legal entity customer must identify and verify each individual who directly or indirectly owns 25 per cent or more of the entity’s equity interests, plus a single individual with significant responsibility to control, manage or direct it, and must retain the identifying information obtained — including any certification — together with a description of how it was verified, for five years. Two limits belong in the same breath. The rule applies to accounts opened on or after 11 May 2018, and FinCEN’s own FAQs state that institutions are not required to conduct retroactive reviews of accounts opened before that date. And under an exceptive relief order of 13 February 2026, an institution may now identify beneficial owners when a legal entity customer first opens an account with it rather than at each subsequent account opening, so the certification in the file may describe the entity as it stood at the start of the relationship rather than on the day the account at issue was opened.
The Department of Justice publishes a Subpoena for Bank Records Checklist, meant to be completed for each and every account subpoenaed, and it makes a serviceable drafting template for a civil subpoena as well as a criminal one: account opening documents, signature cards, change of signatory cards, account title status change documents, financial power of attorney documents, monthly statements, front and back copies of all canceled checks, deposit tickets, checks in deposit, withdrawal tickets, cashier’s checks, courtesy checks, wire transfers, online or internet transfers, incoming and outgoing correspondence, the institution’s own written or electronic notes and comments on the account, its emails and alerts, and account closure documents. One line on that list is restricted rather than merely difficult. Suspicious Activity Reports carry an unwaivable statutory privilege under 31 U.S.C. § 5318(g)(2): an institution served with a subpoena must decline to produce a SAR and must decline to confirm that one exists. The underlying transaction records remain producible, and those are what a private party should be asking for.
Several other holders belong in the same subpoena plan. 6 Del. C. § 18-104(g) requires every limited liability company to give its registered agent the name, business address and business telephone number of a natural person — a member, manager, officer, employee or designated agent — who is authorised to receive communications from the agent, and provides that the information “shall not be deemed public.” Not public is not the same as not obtainable: it means the record exists in an identifiable pair of hands. The formation agent or law firm that organized the entity holds the engagement file. Partnership returns and Schedule K-1s name the members and their percentages. Where the money terminated in residential property, the county recorder shows the grantee entity but not the people behind it, and the federal fix for that is not currently operating: FinCEN’s Residential Real Estate Rule, which would have required beneficial ownership reports on non-financed transfers to entities and trusts, was vacated on 19 March 2026 by the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, and FinCEN states that while the order stands reporting persons are not required to file and are not subject to liability if they fail to do so. FinCEN and the Department of Justice have appealed.
Is knowing who owns the LLC the same as knowing who controlled the money?
No, and control is usually both the more provable fact and the more useful one. Membership interests can sit behind a nominee, a trust, a holding company in another state, or a chain of all three, and each layer is cheap to add and slow to unwind. The signature card, the online banking credentials, the device that authorised the outgoing wire and the address the debit card was posted to cannot be layered the same way, because at some point a natural person has to touch the account. That is why an ownership question that stalls in the corporate filings often resolves in the bank’s file.
Control is also the fact a court can act on. A constructive trust or an equitable lien attaches to specific property, so identifying who held authority over the receiving account is a step toward property rather than toward a characterisation of anybody. State the finding at exactly its own width. That a named person signed the account opening documents and authorised the outgoing transfers establishes authority over the account. It does not establish what that person knew, intended or believed, and the rules of evidence are unusually direct about the difference. Federal Rule of Evidence 704(b) bars an expert in a criminal case from stating an opinion about whether the defendant did or did not have a mental state that constitutes an element of the crime charged or of a defense. In civil cases, where 704(b) does not reach, the In re Rezulin line excludes expert opinion on “the intent, motives or states of mind of corporations,” 309 F. Supp. 2d 531, 546 (S.D.N.Y. 2004).
Two professional standards run to the same line from the other direction. AICPA Statement on Standards for Forensic Services No. 1 ¶10 provides that the ultimate decision regarding the occurrence of fraud is determined by a trier of fact and that a member performing forensic services is prohibited from opining on that ultimate conclusion, while expressly permitting expert opinions on whether evidence is consistent with certain elements of fraud or other laws. The ACFE CFE Code of Professional Standards § V.B.2 bars any opinion on the legal guilt or innocence of any person or party. These are membership obligations binding AICPA members and Certified Fraud Examiners rather than rules of evidence, and neither stops an examiner from concluding who controlled an account, where funds went, or that the evidence is consistent with a specified element. Beneficial ownership analysis sits comfortably inside that permission. An expert who reaches past it has given opposing counsel a motion to file.
What if the LLC was formed offshore, or the money left the country?
The available tools narrow sharply, and the strongest of them belong to the government rather than to a private party. Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties run government to government, are typically prosecutor-driven, and are unavailable to civil litigants. Under 31 U.S.C. § 5318(k)(3), as amended by the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, the Secretary of the Treasury or the Attorney General may subpoena a foreign bank that maintains a correspondent account in the United States for any records relating to that account or to any account at the foreign bank, including records maintained outside the United States, with a civil penalty of up to $50,000 for each day the bank fails to comply. A plaintiff cannot issue that subpoena.
What a private party has instead is 28 U.S.C. § 1782, letters rogatory, and the disclosure orders available in other courts. Section 1782 permits a district court to order discovery for use in a proceeding before a foreign or international tribunal, and ZF Automotive US, Inc. v. Luxshare, Ltd., 596 U.S. 619 (2022), held that the statute reaches only governmental or intergovernmental adjudicative bodies, which removed private commercial arbitration from its scope. Letters rogatory rest on comity rather than treaty and are slow and unpredictable. In England, a Norwich Pharmacal order compels an innocent third party mixed up in wrongdoing to disclose information identifying a wrongdoer, and a Bankers Trust order is aimed specifically at bank account disclosure to trace misappropriated funds and protect a proprietary claim; applications are frequently made on both bases together.
The assumption that Europe is more transparent than the United States is worth testing before anyone relies on it. In Joined Cases C-37/20 and C-601/20, decided on 22 November 2022, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidated the provision of the Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive giving the general public access to beneficial ownership registers. The 2024 EU anti-money laundering package restores access to those who can demonstrate a legitimate interest, but it applies from 10 July 2027, with some registry-access provisions phased later. The United Kingdom is the genuine exception: the register of people with significant control at Companies House is open to public inspection without charge and shows each person’s name, month and year of birth, nationality, country of residence, service address, the date they became a person with significant control and which conditions of control they meet. The day of the date of birth is concealed on the public record, a usual residential address is not disclosed unless the person has nominated it as their service address, and an individual may apply to have their PSC information protected from publication.
How long do I have before finding the owner stops being worth anything?
Less time than the ownership question usually gets, because the value of the answer is the remedy behind it and the remedy decays without anyone doing anything. The reason to identify the entity is not the name. It is that under Grupo Mexicano de Desarrollo, S.A. v. Alliance Bond Fund, Inc., 527 U.S. 308 (1999), a federal district court generally has no authority to enjoin a defendant from disposing of assets pending adjudication of a claim for money damages where the plaintiff claims no lien or equitable interest in them. The path around that bar runs through equity: a plaintiff may seek restitution in equity, ordinarily in the form of a constructive trust or an equitable lien, “where money or property identified as belonging in good conscience to the plaintiff could clearly be traced to particular funds or property in the defendant’s possession.” Great-West Life & Annuity Insurance Co. v. Knudson, 534 U.S. 204, 213 (2002). The same passage states the failure condition: once the property or its proceeds “have been dissipated so that no product remains,” the claimant is “merely a general creditor.”
Two clocks run against a claim of that kind. Where the received funds were commingled, courts commonly apply the lowest intermediate balance rule, under which the claimant’s traceable interest is capped at the lowest balance the account reached after the tainted deposit. As the Third Circuit put it in In re Columbia Gas Systems Inc., 997 F.2d 1039, 1063 (3d Cir. 1993), “Once trust money is removed, however, it is not replenished by subsequent deposits.” The Fourth Circuit applied the rule the same way in In re Dameron, 155 F.3d 718, 724 (4th Cir. 1998): “In no case is the trust permitted to be replenished by deposits made subsequent to the lowest intermediate balance.” If the account is emptied, the traceable claim is gone, and no volume of later deposits restores it. Separately, Bank Secrecy Act records generally must be retained five years under 31 CFR 1010.430(d), which is a practical floor on how far back an account history can be reconstructed, though many institutions keep records longer.
None of that is a promise. Entities are cheap to form and cheap to abandon, funds may have been dissipated before anyone looked, and a trace can be complete, correct and fully documented and still arrive at an empty account. It is also worth keeping two questions apart. What the ownership answer unlocks is a question about identifying specific property, answered forward from records that exist. What the underlying loss was worth is a different question, answered by modeling a state of affairs that did not happen, and that question belongs to our Economic Damages Institute. Plenty of forensic accountants do both, and the same CPA often signs both halves; the split here is between the questions, not between the professions. This Institute covers the first one, and whether the record underneath it will hold.