NCJ Number
157122
Date Published
1995
Length
13 pages
Annotation
To combat money laundering practices engaged in by criminal enterprises, the Bank Secrecy Act requires financial institutions to report and maintain records of certain financial transactions.
Abstract
These recordkeeping requirements are designed to help law enforcement agencies conduct criminal, tax, or regulatory investigations, and to help authorities identify suspicious and unusual financial transactions. Specifically, criminal organizations often convert illicit cash proceeds into monetary instruments such as traveler's or cashier's checks, or money orders. Financial institutions are urged by the Department of the Treasury and Federal financial industry regulators to develop know- your-customer policies that will allow bank employees to become familiar with client banking practices so that they can recognize transactions that are outside the normal course of a customer's business practices. Some activities that might be considered unusual include an account that shows frequent deposits of large bills for a business that normally does not deal in large amounts of cash, deposits of numerous checks but rare withdrawals of cash for daily operations, customer reluctance to produce identification, or transactions that indicate a customer is trying to circumvent these recordkeeping requirements by engaging in transactions totaling less than $3,000 each. 1 table and 2 appendixes