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The U.S. financial intelligence unit is launching a review of data it collects from financial institutions pursuant to the Bank Secrecy Act, a senior Treasury Department official said in a congressional hearing Thursday.

Ken Blanco, director of the department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, told the Senate Banking Committee that the bureau will appoint a private vendor to assess the precise value to regulators and law enforcement of the hundreds of thousands of reports financial institutions file each year on suspicious transactions and other client behavior.

As part of the review, which Blanco said would take 12 to 18 months to complete, FinCEN staff and outside consultants will explore how to improve the quality, collection and distribution of financial intelligence.

“What are the SARs [suspicious activity reports] that actually need to be reported on, where do they need to be reported and how should they be reported?” Blanco told lawmakers. “All those things are on the table.”

Thursday’s hearing marked the fourth of 2018 in which the committee has considered proposals for modernizing implementation and enforcement of the Bank Secrecy Act, or BSA, a 1970 law designed to combat money laundering and other illicit finance.

Lawmakers broadly agree “there is room for change” in the United States’ “decades-old” anti-money laundering regime, but have not yet reached a consensus on “any one particular reform or fix,” the committee’s chairman, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID), said Thursday.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Federal Reserve and National Credit Union Administration have in the meantime pushed forward with their own efforts to reform the BSA.

The OCC has begun reviewing its policies and procedures to redirect resources “where they can be most effective” and improve AML supervision and examinations, Grovetta Gardineer, the agency’s senior deputy comptroller for compliance, said at the hearing.

Other federal banking agencies, FinCEN and the Treasury Department have also joined with the OCC to encourage financial institutions to allocate AML resources commensurate to risk and track illicit funds more “proactively,” including by using artificial intelligence, machine learning and other emerging technologies.

“We expect the banking agencies and FinCEN will issue a joint statement on this topic very soon,” Gardineer said.

Recent outcomes include an Oct. 3 advisory in which federal regulators outlined instances where banks and credit unions can merge their compliance efforts, as well as ongoing revisions to the BSA examination manual.

Gardineer separately suggested at the hearing that lawmakers consider opening a “regular review” of BSA rules to identify areas in need of refinement. The reviews could proceed similar to those mandated by the Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act, she said.

“We believe it could be an incredibly great opportunity for them [FinCEN] to hear of ways to strengthen the framework of the regulatory regime.”

The proposal provoked a harsh response from Blanco, who said that “adding another layer of bureaucracy” to the regulatory process would be “inappropriate and unnecessary,” and lamented that the OCC had not run the proposal by the bureau ahead of the hearing.

“And by the way, when we have to respond to a legislative enactment like that, I’m moving resources out of our everyday work investigating terrorists, and money launderers, and human rights violators and human traffickers to respond to that kind of stuff.”

Lawmakers, regulators and investigators appeared more in agreement on the need for legislation to mandate that legal entities disclose their beneficial owners at the time of incorporation, whereas FinCEN’s customer due-diligence rule, in effect since May, “relies entirely” on financial institutions to collect such information.

But they diverged on plans to increase the monetary thresholds at which banks and other institutions must file SARs and currency transaction reports to FinCEN.