Banks are largely ignoring requests made by casinos under a confidential data-sharing program designed to combat illicit finance, according to sources.
The United States should shore up safe-harbor protections for banks and extend new anti-money laundering duties to check cashers, credit card systems operators and others, a U.S. taskforce has found.
U.S. financial institutions and their regulators will eventually need to collect and analyze increasingly large volumes of information on their clients and compliance efforts, bankers and officials said Monday.
Representatives from the financial industry have asked the U.S. Treasury Department to streamline a Patriot Act program that allows banks to share their suspicions with each other about client activity.
A team of law enforcement and bank officials may provide a model for how investigators and compliance officers at small and midsize financial institutions can better communicate, say individuals involved.
A U.S. Treasury Department advisory detailing red flags of reverse-mortgage scams takes another step in placing more responsibility for identifying such frauds within banks' anti-money laundering programs, say consultants.
The U.S. Treasury Department issued rules Friday broadening the types of law enforcement data requests banks can receive to include queries from foreign officials and investigations tied to additional crimes.
A mortgage lending association has plans to create a database that will allow users to share data on specific instances of suspected fraud.
Limits such as a rule prohibiting financial institutions from sharing SAR information with nonbank affiliates hinder banks due diligence efforts, Bank of America Compliance Chief William Fox said at a compliance conference in Atlanta.
Many bank employees can't differentiate between SAR-related and other information requests they receive from law enforcement agencies, regulators and other financial institutions. As a result, some hinder financial investigations by ignoring the requests.
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