The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) administers the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), our nation's first and most comprehensive anti-money laundering statute. The BSA requires depository institutions and other industries vulnerable to money laundering to take a number of precautions against financial crime. This includes filing and reporting certain data about financial transactions possibly indicative of money laundering, including cash transactions over $10,000 and suspicious transactions. In fiscal year 2019, more than 20 million BSA reports were filed by more than 97,000 U.S. financial institutions, providing a wealth of potentially useful information to agencies whose mission is to detect and prevent money laundering, other financial crimes, and terrorism.
The mere filing of these reports has significant value in deterring money laundering. However, for these reports to be of value in detecting money laundering, they must be accessible to law enforcement, counter-terrorism agencies, financial regulators, and the intelligence community. FinCEN believes that this can best be achieved through the deployment of effective technology and systems, representing solutions designed with our stakeholder needs in mind.
