Читать книгу Anti-Money Laundering State Mechanisms - Michele Sciurba - Страница 8

In 1970, the US adopted the BSA which, for the first time, required financial institutions to report deposits, withdrawals, exchanges of currency, or transfers exceeding USD 10,000. In order to meet the BSA’s requirements, the financial institutions had to install corresponding internal controlling and monitoring systems. Compliance officers now monitored the daily activities and trained the bank personnel to meet the new demands under the BSA.¹⁵ In addition, the Money Laundering Control Act¹⁶ of 1986 defined ML as a serious crime punishable with a fine of up to USD 500,000 or up to 20 years of imprisonment.¹⁷ In the late 1980s, the UN and EU added the issue of global cross-border activities of organised crime to their agenda.¹⁸

One of the BSA’s main tasks is to impede money laundering while helping US banks to be less vulnerable to ML activities. In order to integrate AML programs into financial institutions, designed to uncover and stop financial crimes, the BSA has authorised the Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury to adopt regulations appropriate for the implementation of the Act and require implementation from banks and financial institutions.¹⁹ Organised crime responded to the new measures under the BSA by dividing transfers of “dirty” money into amounts below USD 10,000 to avoid potential monitoring. In response to this behaviour, the supervisory authorities tightened the reporting requirements for suspicious transactions to amounts exceeding USD 5,000.²⁰ The BSA regime placed different requirements on individual financial institutions and intermediaries. Western Union, for example, has to report transactions exceeding USD 3,000. All things considered, the BSA represents a starting point in two respects. First, it marks the beginning of modern AML legislation for combating organised crime. Notably, similar AML legislation has been implemented globally based on the BSA model. Second, the BSA began a creeping erosion of banking secrecy, abandoning the protection of bank customer privacy. In the entire Western world today, virtually any bank customer can become the subject of a money laundering investigation without reasonable suspicion or grounds.²¹