More reporting possibly in the wings?

See Sunday's NY Times for the full article. This is just the beginning of the article.

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U.S. Seeks Access to Bank Records to Deter Terror
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: April 10, 2005

WASHINGTON, April 9 - The Bush administration is developing a plan to give the government access to possibly hundreds of millions of international banking records in an effort to trace and deter terrorist financing, even as many bankers say they already feel besieged by government antiterrorism rules that they consider overly burdensome.

The initiative, as conceived by a working group within the Treasury Department, would vastly expand the government's database of financial transactions by gaining access to logs of international wire transfers into and out of American banks. Such overseas transactions were used by the Sept. 11 hijackers to wire more than $130,000, officials said, and are still believed to be vulnerable to terrorist financiers.

Government officials said in interviews that the effort, which grew out of a brief, little-noticed provision in the intelligence reform bill passed by Congress in December, would give them the tools to track leads on specific suspects and, more broadly, to analyze patterns in terrorist financing and other financial crimes. They said they were mindful of privacy concerns that such a system is likely to provoke and wanted to include safeguards to prevent misuse of what would amount to an enormous cache of financial records.

The provision authorized the Treasury Department to pursue regulations requiring financial institutions to turn over "certain cross-border electronic transmittals of funds" that may be needed in combating money laundering and terrorist financing.

I've been hearing about the cross-border transaction reporting as well. It was my understanding that this reporting would not just be wires, but any electronic funds transfers into and out of the U.S.

So how about it - We simply develop monthly government reports that we send in and let THEM figure out what the heck is going on!

The monthly reports would include:
1. All cash in and/or cash out in excess of $10,000 a month (this would replace the CTR for all deposit account)

2. All wire transfer activity.

3. All ACH and Bill Pay activity (so the government can see how much I pay for my wireless bills.....)

4. All loans made each month (this would replace HMDA and CRA)

Oh heck - why don't we just send the government a copy of our entire Transaction Journal for the month and be done with it!!!!!

Privacy? Oh yeah - we promise we won't sell your name to the Book of the Month club. That's about the extent of "Privacy" these days.

Hello? KGB? Any ex-agents looking for a job?

We could just provide a signon to our systems, provided we have adequate controls for FDICIA and Sarbanes!

This is getting out of hand. The government already has access to these records when banks report suspicious activity and reference wires. They have immediate access to the referenced records and can subpoena additional records. Sounds like they want regular reporting.

Perhaps the industry can negotiate a trade for reduced reporting of suspicious activity if the government gets direct reports of activity.

Reminds me of George Orwell's "1984" and the movie "Brazil".

I agree with Bonnie on this. If they're going to push this to the limit, it will be much easier for everyone (banks, credit card co's, telephone co's, DMV's, etc.) to submit everything to the "Big Brother". I like this much better than deputizing everyone. If we don't put a stop to this, we may see "SAR's for Teachers", "SAR's for Block Captains", "SAR's for ALL Businesses other than Banks, Casinos and MSB's", etc.

This probably due to the fact our CIA and other intelligence agencies can't get intelligence on their own.

I used to support the Patriot Act, now I'm beginning to wonder whether we've given one mile and the government is now taking a thousand. I mean, establishing safe borders and stopping terrorism is one thing, but when does the price become greater than the benefit?

The tendency of law enforcement is to never give anything up once it's been gained, even if the tool is not useful on a day-to-day basis. Law enforcement wants to keep the tool in the box just in case it's ever needed.

It's kind of like an everyday homeowner purchasing a $50,000 set of tools that includes one of everything. It's not likely that they will ever need certain tools, but, by gosh, it's good to know the tools are there if the opportunity ever arises. They never stop to consider that if the need arises, all they have to do is go out and buy the tool they need for $50 instead paying $50,000 for the entire set.