The U.S. Treasury Department is nearing completion of a plan to use predictive analytics software to analyze regulatory data and identify possible financial crimes, an official said Tuesday.
The U.S. government's financial intelligence unit will resume an abandoned practice of fining banks for Bank Secrecy Act violations apart from the enforcement actions it works on with federal regulators, say sources.
A $120 million U.S. Treasury Department initiative to update the database that stores and disseminates Bank Secrecy Act reports is behind schedule on nearly a quarter of the projects required for completion, a federal watchdog agency said.
A little more than two years ago, investigators for a large state got a letter from a U.S. Treasury agency notifying them that the suspicious activity report they had accessed a few weeks earlier had also been viewed by a district attorney's office in another state.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. Treasury Department's financial intelligence unit had one overriding objective: to better share its cache of Bank Secrecy Act data with investigators.
An effort by the country's financial intelligence unit to take ownership of Bank Secrecy Act data managed by the IRS appears to be on track, according to industry observers and the U.S. Treasury Department.
Poor project management and the inability of managers to take either criticism or corrective action were among the factors that doomed the U.S. Treasury Department's $17.4 million Bank Secrecy Act data initiative, according to a federal watchdog agency.
The U.S. Treasury Department wrote off $3.2 million in 2008 from a failed Bank Secrecy Act data mining program, bringing the losses associated with the project to at least $15.4 million.
The system, expected to be in operation next month, will help banks streamline the process of providing examiners with proof of compliance with law enforcement requests, FinCEN Director James Freis said.