The Government Accountability Office found significant room for improvement regarding the Department of Justice’s obligation under the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 to provide the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network with information on its use of Bank Secrecy Act reports.
According to a new report from the GAO, “FinCEN receives limited data from law enforcement agencies on their use of BSA reports or the reports’ impact on case outcomes because agencies largely do not collect such data. As a result, FinCEN cannot provide comprehensive feedback to financial institutions on the usefulness of the BSA reports they file,” another requirement under AMLA.
To help rectify the situation, the GAO recommended that DOJ include data on the use of BSA reports in its ongoing agency-wide efforts to improve data collection and to involve its chief information officer and statistical official in the design of its annual BSA statistical report. The DOJ neither agreed nor disagreed with the recommendations.
