Efforts to ramp up the U.S. financial intelligence unit's enforcement of the Bank Secrecy Act have run into a longstanding hurdle: the bureau's reliance on financial regulators for case leads.
When FinCEN restructured its reporting hierarchy, the bureau signaled a subtle but important shift for banks: some of the energy it had once spent toward improving compliance would now serve to penalize regulatory violators, says former Assistant Director for the Office of Compliance Tom Fleming.
The potential expanded use of a Patriot Act data-sharing authority would help Bank Secrecy Act officers better identify suspicious account activity and avoid costly enforcement actions, say industry experts.
Lawmakers should expand financial safe harbor protections to allow banks to better share their suspicions about money laundering and its predicate crimes, a top U.S. regulatory official said Sunday.
The U.S. Treasury Department's financial intelligence unit is considering invoking for the first time a Bank Secrecy Act power to obtain data on foreign banks, say multiple sources.
The nation's primary financial intelligence unit has been structurally reorganized to better integrate how the bureau analyzes and shares data on money laundering and other crimes, its director said Monday.
The U.S. Treasury Department cleared the way Tuesday for financial institutions to share regulatory information with an Arizona-based company that plans to pool anti-money laundering data from hundreds of banks.
A recently adopted legislative amendment that would authorize punitive measures against foreign banks and countries that facilitate U.S. tax evasion faces significant opposition in the House of Representatives, say congressional sources and advocacy groups.
Looking back on a decade of efforts to block terrorist financing, former U.S. officials and investigators remember days that were hectic and exhilarating.
An anti-fraud company backed by several large American financial institutions is asking the U.S. Treasury Department whether it is legally protected to manage a shared database on suspected money launderers.
Dozens of U.S. banks have begun sharing suspicious transaction data without the use of formal bank-to-bank requests in an effort to better detect potential fraud and money laundering, say compliance officers.
Lawmakers proposed a measure Wednesday that would potentially prohibit banks from processing credit card transactions for merchants and maintaining correspondent accounts for financial institutions deemed vulnerable to money laundering and tax evasion.
The U.S. Treasury Department doesn't expect financial institutions to treat the 28 countries blacklisted by an intergovernmental group last month for weak anti-money laundering controls as non-cooperating nations under U.S. Patriot Act rules.
The U.S. Treasury Department issued rules Friday broadening the types of law enforcement data requests banks can receive to include queries from foreign officials and investigations tied to additional crimes.
With a newly elected president and Congress, many have argued that it's time to reassess the post-September 11, 2001 counter terrorism financing regime. Uniquely qualified to lead that discussion at the 14th Annual International Money Laundering Conference are Dennis Lormel and Michael German.
The U.S. Treasury Department must improve the way it designates financial institutions and jurisdictions it believes to be at higher risk for money laundering, according to a government watchdog report released Thursday.
Banks need better legal safeguards when sharing customer information with other financial institutions in mortgage fraud investigations, say bank compliance professionals. At least one bank industry group wants to get Congress to consider such safeguards.