"SHARE" and "ICE": What Are They, and Why Should You Care?
by Mary Beth Guard, BOL Guru
Add "SHARE", "ICE", and "Operation Cornerstone" to your lexicon of terms and names spawned by efforts to combat terrorism and money laundering.
A new program launched by the Department of Homeland Security in June 2003 called SHARE is designed to keep bankers in the information loop on what the government discovers about trends and vulnerabilities in the course of financial investigations.
SHARE is an acronym for Systematic Homeland Approach to Reducing Exploitation. It is a joint initiative between the Secret Service and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE"), both of which now operate under the auspices of Homeland Security.
The plan is for meetings to be held with executive members of the financial services industry and trade communities. During those meetings the government will provide data on specific investigative outcomes relating to money laundering, identity theft and other financial crimes. With the information gained through the process, it is hoped that financial institutions will be in a better position to detect and prevent this type of activity. The first meeting will be held sometime in October, and semi-annually thereafter.
Another new initiative that ICE has launched is a new financial investigations program they've titled Operation Cornerstone. It has four objectives:
to identify vulnerabilities in financial systems through which criminals launder their illicit proceeds;
to bring the criminals to justice;
to eliminate the vulnerabilities; and
to develop a working partnership with industry representatives to share information and close industry-wide security gaps that could be exploited by money launderers and other criminal organizations.
On October 1, 2003, ICE announced that a bank with a principal office in New York, NY and a branch in Miami, FL, Delta national Bank and Trust Company, pled guilty to a criminal information charging the bank with one count of failure to file a Suspicious Activity Report in connection with a transaction made between two accounts at the bank involving a Colombian national customer who operated an independent foreign currency exchange in Bogota, Colombia. As part of the plea agreement with the government, the bank agreed to forfeit $950,000 to the United States.
Under these new initiatives, the Department of Homeland Security will be conducting training programs for the financial community on how to identify and prevent exploitation by criminal organizations. Joint studies are also in the works.
To help combat computer crime, the Secret Service and the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordinating Center (CERT/CC) of Carnegie Mellon University will be releasing an "Insider Threat Study", and the Secret Service is expanding its number of Electronic Crimes Task Forces from nine to thirteen.
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