A tech-driven ‘Manhattan Project’ at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is among significant reforms recommended by an anti-money-laundering group.
To keep from falling further behind in the battle against criminal money and terrorism financing, the United States must remake the federal agency at the center of the fight, according to a new report that draws on the views of top anti-money laundering experts.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — known in shorthand as FinCEN — is underfunded and overstretched in its role as a leading player in the global effort to catch money launderers and other sophisticated financial criminals who use shell companies, cryptocurrencies and other tools to hide their activities, the nonprofit anti-corruption group Global Financial Integrity says.
“It is an agency that is struggling … to meet the nation’s emerging money laundering challenges of the coming decade and beyond,” the report says. But it adds that the U.S. government “should not see these realities as acceptable and impervious to change.”
The report urges the government to boost FinCEN’s funding and to embrace fundamental changes in how the agency operates. It proposes, for example, that FinCEN launch a “Manhattan Project” to develop new ways to use data and cutting-edge technology to fight financial crime.
Anti-money-laundering efforts by the U.S. government and the banks it oversees “are widely seen as inefficient and ineffective,” the report says, citing the FinCEN Files investigation by BuzzFeed News, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other media partners worldwide, which revealed that major banks had continued to profit from suspect transactions even after authorities had fined them for compliance failures.
