American officials acted within their rights when barring a European investigator from reviewing an audit of how the two continents exchange data linked to terrorist financing, EU attorneys said Thursday.
Plans by the U.S. securities market regulator to more strictly enforce regulations will result in a jump in anti-money laundering penalties both by the agency and its private sector partner.
The EU is pushing the United States for answers following reports that the National Security Agency siphoned bank messaging data held in the European Union, possibly in violation of a July 2010 treaty.
The top European Union official for civil rights said Wednesday that the U.S. Justice Department has yet to answer all of her concerns about a controversial American surveillance program.
Ongoing negotiations between the United States and European Union on a broad data-sharing arrangement will likely be complicated following the leaked disclosure this month of a transnational American surveillance program.
Amendments to Hong Kong's data privacy law could restrict financial institutions from sharing data on suspected money launderers with branches outside of the special administrative region.
Countries should ease their privacy restrictions that hinder cross-border data-sharing on suspicious transactions, according to a Toronto-based intergovernmental group of financial intelligence units.
A renewed emphasis on customer data privacy in the European Union is making it difficult for U.S. financial institutions to conduct background checks on EU customers, and in some cases has exposed them to fines, according to legal consultants.
In the push by global governments for greater financial transparency and greater privacy guarantees, large financial institutions are left struggling to reconcile these two competing principles. The conflict is most striking for banks dealing with so-called secrecy jurisdictions.
Because data protection laws in Europe and elsewhere make it difficult for a multinational financial institution to share data among all of its branches, the laws "will be the biggest impediment to protection from terrorism," the officials said.
Seeking to combat identity theft, federal and state lawmakers have advanced a number of initiatives that would restrict how banks and other companies use Social Security numbers to identify consumers.
Plans for a national identification system that would require personal information to be stored in state-controlled databases will boost bank costs associated with large-scale data breaches, according to privacy consultants and information policy analysts.
A March report on national security letter subpoenas stated that some companies provided excessive information about their customers during terrorist investigations.
The new forms will be released Wednesday by the Treasury Department for a 60-day comment period.