Regulators Provide Current Stats on Results of BSA Reporting

By Jonathan Winer

In a speech delivered February 9 by FDIC Chairman Sheila C. Bair, at a money laundering symposium, Chairman Bair defended the effectiveness of the use of Section 314 of the Patriot Act by which FinCEN has "pinged" financial institutions to locate accounts and transactions belonging to people that may be involved in financing terrorism or money laundering.

According to Chairman Bair, the Section 314 information sharing has yielded "productive leads" for terrorist financing, arms and drug trafficking, international identity theft, nationwide investment fraud and operations with a U.S. sanctioned country involving some 3,200 transactions and 2,200 accounts.

Her statistic-rich speech stated that over the past five years, the use of the Section 314 information has led to the issuance of more than 1,700 subpoenas, over 100 indictments, 99 arrests, nine convictions, and the location of $22 million in suspect funds.

Also of interest in her speech was the statement that between 30 to 50 percent of the FBI's targeted terrorist subjects matched names listed in the FinCEN database, and that 20 percent of the SARS coded for terrorist finance actually contained the names of subjects of open FBI terrorism investigations.

TrackBack