WASHINGTON — Three lawmakers, including the chairman and ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee have sent a letter to the Comptroller of the U.S. seeking a Governmental Accountability Office study of the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the use of Suspicious Activity Reports and Currency Transaction Reports.
The July 19 letter from Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass), Spencer Bachus (R-Ala) and Rep. Steve Lynch (D-Mass) includes what the letter called the SAR process.
“According to FinCEN, over one million SARs were filed in 2006, and depository institutions and firms in the securities and futures industries accounted for over half of them,” the lawmakers wrote.
“At the May hearing, a number of banking industry witnesses commented that they lacked clear guidance on what law enforcement is looking for and finds useful in these reports, and noted that the industry engages in 'defensive' SAR filings, or erring on the side of filing a SAR even if there is doubt about its usefulness, in order to avoid the possibility of being penalized by federal financial institution regulators,” the lawmakers wrote.
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