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Amid Deep Skepticism, German Officials Claim Success Against STR Backlog

By Gabriel Vedrenne

Germany's financial intelligence unit has whittled down most of the country's latest embarrassing backlog of tens of thousands of unreviewed suspicious transaction reports since December, when the full extent of the problem came to light. A little more than a month after admitting to accruing a record backlog of 101,000 STRs and watching Christof Schulte, the FIU's now-erstwhile director, resign without warning, officials told lawmakers in written answers published Tuesday that the stack had dropped below 38,000 reports after they reassigned 120 employees to work on the problem full time. Officials first confirmed the existence of the backlog in August...

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