One of the main reasons FinCEN requires strict confidentiality on SARs is to not tip off the account owners that they're being watched/investigated.
Investigators will often monitor the accounts to gather enough evidence to prosecute them or to gain intel into broader criminal networks. Regulators also rightfully don't want money launderers to know the playbook and tactics they use to track down these networks.
The secrecy also protects bank employees. If you're a compliance department worker that's reporting on potential criminal activities of terrorists or a criminal network to the authorities, and you think there's a risk you'll be outed, you might be less willing to submit the SAR.
Not a bank employee leaking the data.
Why would they leak it? Cause they know the system is fubar.
The simple question to ask is how many people are needed to monitor the system.
Now you have one clown after another saying the banks file zillions of reports every day.
Thats not the issue. Someone has to monitor all that.
And when that someone realizes they arent making a dent, given the volumes, they get sick of the pointlessness and leak the DB.
This is going to keep happening. Swiss leaks, Panama papers, libor etc etc
We have learnt how to scale things up over the last 20 year exponentially.
But oversight can't scale exponentially.
It's unsustainable and pressure will build to ridiculous levels on regulators and law enforcement.
No. It will generate a CTR. It may generate a SAR.
I recently read "Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who stole the world" and can't recommend it highly enough. It shows that tax fraud and offshore banking is despite propaganda that "it's dead" very much alive and the US is a central player now. Hollywood still uses Switzerland and the Cayman's but a lot more convenient are setups involving Nevada, New Mexico, etc.
Offshore banking is a key component in maintaining control when an empire retreats/collapses. The French installed puppets in Gabon who let them launder their money until today in a similar fashion that the City of London and the more reckless jurisdictions (BVI) allowed the Brits to keep their loot which they stole in the past 200 years.
we had a chance to burn all this to the ground during the financial crisis but Occupy Wallstreet was just a "leaflet campaign" without teeth. You don't fight a real enemy that subverts the rules of democracy with democratic tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:_Tax_Havens_a...
I think you meant to write something like:
You don't fight a real enemy that subverts the rules of democracy with subverted democratic tools.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-amer...
Collateral Damage, Snowden panama papers...
Imagine if they spend 10% of resources that they spent going after leakers punishing real perpetrators.
If they are, they probably don't want the perpetrators to know how much information they have.
If so, their cases may have just been blown apart by these leaks, and the perpetrators are even less likely to get persecuted.
What happened?
Some people had to pay fines. The company paid a small fine with no charges filed. Leaker went to prison.
The system is completely corrupt.
Didn't we have many financial crime leaks this past decade with essentially no repercussions?
>Twenty-three countries have already recovered at least US$1.2 billion in taxes, heads of government implicated in corruption or tax avoidance have resigned or faced prosecution and there have been investigations in at least 82 countries. Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the centre of the story, has shut down and the Panama Papers have prompted high-level political debates and expedited policy reforms around the world
https://www.transparency.org/en/news/three-years-after-the-p...
So it seems what I said is still correct... almost no repercussions for white collar crime across the globe. I'd bet it still occurs rampantly.
It's certainly conventional wisdom in financial circles that a SAR is worth about as much as a user report on a Reddit comment.
You’re asking for something to be proved - or supporting evidence that requires a whole dissertation - because your exposure is starting from a position that is fundamentally wrong.
“Suspicious” is a misnomer referring to an automatic reporting threshold, that in fewer additional circumstances allows for discretion in filing. The end.
I’m baffled how asking for data is revealing my position?
I had the hope that your position is well founded and it would be easy to point to actual data.
I hardly believe that the compliance laws are not accompanied by studies that collect the data that i asked for. So it should be out there.
Good luck.
It’s financial crimes. If someone leaked investigational records of say, the FBI, while they are investigating an extortion ring, that could seriously compromise any prosecution.
Seems reasonable to me to punish someone leaking information that was meant to be private.
National security...
Seems China practiced this excuse so well that US decides to copy that...
Edit: you don’t publish your company’s proprietary source code and then expect you just walk away right? You’d be sued into oblivion. It’s important that people abide by their agreements. Whistleblower statutes exist to ensure protection when fraud, abuse, or other illegal activity occurs. I’m not clear if this actually meets that standard.
For what it’s worth, the problem is that most folks don’t know what SARs are, when they’re filed, etc. This is basically the equivalent of leaking a bunch of private banking records that banks have to provide to the government, not “leaking hidden crimes that nobody stopped”
> “The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is aware that various media outlets intend to publish a series of articles based on unlawfully disclosed suspicious activity reports (SARs), as well as other sensitive government documents, from several years ago,” it stated.
> “As FinCEN has stated previously, the unauthorised disclosure of SARs is a crime that can impact the national security of the United States, compromise law enforcement investigations, and threaten the safety and security of the institutions and individuals who file such reports
Government response: Punish the leakers