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Some Suspicious Activity Reports Go Unread, Underused, Say Former U.S. Officials

By Brian Monroe

The federal agency charged with collecting and analyzing the reports of suspicious transactions and customers filed by financial institutions only looks at about 20 percent of the more than one million submitted every year, say former agency insiders. Each year, tens of thousands of the financial regulatory filings, known as suspicious activity reports (SARs), remain unexamined or lay fallow for a year or more despite their availability to dozens of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, as well as nearly 90 review teams throughout the United States, according to former FinCEN agents That so many SARs have yet to...

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