The current implementation and purpose of currency transaction reports.
These are random documents sent to the government when some transactions over a certain dollar amount are done, ostensibly to help prevent money laundering, in practice just waste everyone’s time.
The Government Accountability Office has reported on this for 30 years. GAO reports are full of other examples too.
A lot of HSBC's "interaction" with criminal elements south of the border was detected via analysis of CTRs.
And don't most banking systems automatically generate a CTR based on the transaction ledger? It's not like a teller is filling out a form and faxing it.
> And don't most banking systems automatically generate a CTR based on the transaction ledger? It's not like a teller is filling out a form and faxing it.
Getting to that point took a very long time.
But its not that much more efficient on the FinCEN side.
The HSBC thing is also another example of how the rest of AML/KYC is not the best implementation. It is only as strong as its weakest link, while burdening all links in this fairly pointless exercise of whitelisting transactions, instead of tackling the actual regressive behaviors that are illegal.
