A U.S. Treasury Department budget proposal to shift Bank Secrecy Act oversight duties from the IRS to state examiners could run into funding troubles from state agencies, say officials.
State prosecutors along the U.S.-Mexico border are studying whether drug traffickers are acting as subagents for Mexican banks that front payments on behalf of American money services businesses.
A new U.S. Treasury Department plan to shift all regulatory reporting to electronic media will push some small money remitters along the U.S.-Mexico border to join the computer age, perhaps reluctantly.
Money services businesses have been slow to respond to an April request by the U.S. Treasury Department to provide more data on their individual agents, say compliance professionals.
For money transmitters, proving to a bank that your company isn't too big of an anti-money laundering risk to take on can be difficult, even more so when you've encountered compliance problems.
A lack of clear regulatory oversight of how money services businesses and casinos comply with economic sanctions has left a gap in U.S. financial crime controls, say former IRS agents.
Canada took its first step last month into fining financial institutions for anti-money laundering troubles, penalizing two money services business and prompting at least one of the companies to close.
The U.S. Treasury Department will likely move quickly in drafting regulations that loosen most restrictions on money remitted from the United States to Cuba, say banking professionals.
The U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said in June 2007 that it was working with Internal Revenue Service and state regulators to produce an anti-money laundering exam manual for MSBs.
Passed unanimously by the Florida Senate, the bill gives greater power to examiners and increases their ranks by allowing outside firms to conduct examinations. It would also give examiners "emergency powers" to yank the license of any MSB they believed guilty of fraud or money laundering.
The manual, issued by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, will include language from a FinCEN ruling on due diligence for certain correspondent accounts for foreign banks, according to people familiar with the matter.