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A U.S. government-supervised mechanism through which financial institutions share intelligence on suspected money launderers and terrorist financiers with federal investigators is highly effective, according to the Treasury Department. Since 2002, FinCEN has processed more than 3,500 requests made through section 314(a) of the Patriot Act, enabling law enforcement agencies to query some 16,000 financial institutions across the United States for account and transactional records of individuals suspected of financial crimes, the bureau wrote in an advisory last month. Roughly 95 percent of the 314(a) queries, each of which may request data on several individuals, “contributed to arrests or indictments,” the...