Beneficial ownership registers — filing and discrepancies

Beneficial ownership registers create two entirely separate obligations, and most firms only notice one of them. The first is a filing duty — you declare your own beneficial owners as a legal entity. The second is a discrepancy-reporting duty that applies to you as an obliged entity, in respect of your customers’ register entries. They have different owners, different triggers and different systems, and the second is the one that gets missed.

1. Two duties, easily confused

2. The 14-day clock, and what accompanies the report

Under Article 24 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, obliged entities must report to the central registers any discrepancies they find between the information in those registers and the information they collect themselves. The report is due without undue delay and in any case within 14 calendar days of detection.

It is a reasoned report, not a flag. It must be accompanied by the information obtained indicating the discrepancy, whom the entity considers the beneficial owners to be — and where applicable the nominee shareholders and nominee directors — and why.

Two cases allow the entity to request information from the customer instead of reporting: discrepancies limited to typographical errors, transliteration differences or minor inaccuracies that do not affect identification; and discrepancies resulting from outdated data where the beneficial owners are known from another reliable source and there are no grounds to suspect an intention to conceal.

3. The registers themselves

Each member state operates its own register, with its own filing mechanics and its own access regime:

• Spain — the central beneficial-owner register created by Royal Decree 609/2023, which also determines who may query it.
• Germany — the Transparenzregister, with its own filing deadlines by legal form and its own discrepancy-reporting duty on obliged entities.
• Netherlands — the register maintained through the Chamber of Commerce, covered in the Dutch AML framework.
• France — the register of beneficial owners, covered in the French AML framework.
• Italy — the beneficial-owner register, covered in the Italian AML framework.

4. Building the discrepancy process

The clock runs from detection, which puts the design burden on knowing when detection occurred. Three things make it work:

• Timestamp the comparison, not the onboarding. Detection is when the register was checked against the file — which may be at onboarding, at periodic review, or when an extract is refreshed. All three paths must write the same field.
• Route the derogation decision. Deciding not to report under the typographical or outdated-data limbs is a decision with conditions attached. Made silently by an analyst closing an alert, there is no record that the conditions were tested.
• Close the loop. Where the derogation is used, the entity requests information from the customer instead. If that request goes unanswered, the basis for not reporting may no longer hold — so the request needs an expiry, not just a send date.

5. The design point underneath all of it

Facts: a firm populates beneficial ownership at onboarding directly from the national register extract, on the reasonable view that the register is authoritative.

What that produces: a file that can never generate a discrepancy report, because there is nothing independent to compare. The firm has also not performed the identification the AMLR requires — Article 22 obliges the entity to identify and verify beneficial owners, and Article 24 obliges it to state whom it considers them to be.

What the practitioner does: treats the register as a verification input rather than a source. The identification is performed on the customer’s own documentation — the ownership chain, the shareholder agreements, the control arrangements — and the register extract is then compared against it. That comparison is the discrepancy control, and it costs almost nothing once the identification is being done properly anyway.

FAQ

Related: The discrepancy duty in detail · What is a beneficial owner · Account registers compared