I'm not very familiar with shell companies, so I'm curious – why isn't this just a matter of privacy for those involved? I'm generally pretty understanding of pro-privacy-oriented behavior.
It's in the public interest to understand what very powerful people are doing , because the public are usually getting the short end of the stick- this should override any ideology regarding 'privacy', 'freedom' and other fuzzy words (not that some interpretation of these things isn't also important)
Pseudonymity is perfectly valid, but there needs to be efficient, effective, and crystal clear means to pierce it and find the actual humans making the decisions with intent when there is a legitimate and well-supported legal need.
There are enough high profile cases of shell corporations being used for unsavory and explicitly illegal behavior, to the extent that it is literally a meme, such as the crimes unveiled in the Panama Papers [1] that simple and robust mechanisms to prevent abuse are warranted even if abuse is uncommon. It is not like being able to pierce the privacy with a court order is even some new mechanism, you can already do that, it is just expensive, time-consuming, and difficult if they fight.
It is then easy for you to take the first step in the cost-benefit analysis you wish to do by estimating the costs. The proposal is that a court order demanding disclosure, which are already routinely issued, can not be stalled indefinitely through the application of lawyers. So, all you need to do is identify the balance of cases where disclosure is fought and then see how often the disclosure results in illegitimate harm to the disclosed party versus how often it results in the discovery of legitimate harms caused by the disclosed party.
The disclosures in the Panama Papers alone resulted in 1.2 billion dollars of recovered taxes [1]. So you can compare the estimated costs against the benefits of preventing a singular incident for now. If you can present credible evidence that the harms of requiring disclosure on legitimate court orders is in excess of that, then a broader analysis of the problem size if warranted.
[1] https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/panama-pap...
> frequently abused to not only protect privacy, but to protect against legitimate legal need
Shell corporations are used for unsavory purposes being a meme is not proof of this as was implied by your other comment. Also 1.2B in taxes is pocket change so it doesn't really help your point.
Trusts in general are simply good estate planning compared to probate costs, at least on the topic of real estate holdings and titling.
To address inevitable replies: No, I don't know exactly where the line is (or lines are - it should probably be a tiered system), and I recognize defining those lines is itself a position of immense power. Those are solvable problems though and don't make the idea bad. (It could still be a bad idea, but for other reasons.)
the default for normal people is for all of this data to be public unless you can either navigate bureaucracy (costs time and money) or pay someone to do it for you (costs money)