投稿者 佐藤雅彦 日時 2001 年 10 月 28 日 18:12:12:
●数年前に「スイスの銀行が第二次大戦中にユダヤ人財産
の強奪に関与していた」という糾弾キャンペーンが起きたとき、
日本のある経済学者が興味ぶかい指摘をしていました。
彼いわく、「これは表面上はスイスの銀行の“戦争犯罪”を
追及する正義の戦いに見えるが、実はEUの出現によって
権益が狭められつつある米国の金融勢力が仕掛けた対欧州
政治戦争である」云々……。 その指摘が本当なら、ユダヤ人
云々というお決まりのクレームは“政治兵器”として使われた
このになる。（それにしても、この“正義のクレーム”は、主張
しようと思えば過去にいつでもできただろうに、“金融ビッグバン”
のタイミングに合わせて出てきたところが茶番であった。ついで
にいえば“金融ビッグバン”のタイミング設定もお笑い草でした。）
●今回は９・１１米国事変をきっかけに世界中の金融機関の
「テロ関係の資金供与を断つ」と称して金融プライバシーの
撤廃工作が進んでいますが、これはいわば「金融エシェロン
計画」なのでしょうね。
●そういえば今月上旬、大橋巨泉が国会で初質問した日の
国会中継を見ていたら、大クラッ大尽の塩自慰が面白い答弁を
していたな。 “資金洗浄”をぜんぶチェックしないのか、と詰め
寄る野党議員に対して、「簡単にアヤシイカネをわけにはいかない。
なぜなら洗浄資金はテロだけでなく麻薬とか色々あるので、その
へんを詳しく分別しないとならないから」云々……。 この爺さん、
麻薬関係のカネでも受け取ってんのかな、と邪推してしまいました。（藁
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http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200111200.shtml
Banks and Suspicion
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By John Berlau
jberlau@InsightMag.com
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Government-required surveillance provisions in the newly passed antiterrorism bills could force banks to rob their customers of both financial privacy and convenience. But how will the provisions aid in curtailing terrorism?
Air travel isn't the only industry hit with big changes in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Depending on how regulators interpret the anti-money-laundering provisions of the hastily passed House and Senate antiterrorism bills, your relationship with your banker - or, for that matter, any business with which you conduct financial transactions, from buying stock to cashing checks - is likely to change forever in ways you will and will not be able to see. That's what insiders of the financial-services industry tell Insight. Many on both the left and right are afraid that in the zeal to stop terrorists from moving their assets into the United States the financial privacy of law-abiding Americans will be sacrificed.
"It's going to be a great inconvenience to people, a great regulatory burden, and no real benefit to what they're trying to do," says J. Bradley Jansen, director of the conservative Free Congress Foundation's Center for Technology Policy. Jansen has coauthored several appeals to Congress on privacy issues with liberal groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union.
Traditionally, Americans have come to expect their banks to protect their privacy and resist sharing sensitive depositor information. Banks, in fact, long promised and delivered such confidentiality, though it never was absolute. Even the most security-conscious bank would cooperate when law-enforcement agencies went to court, showed probable cause and then presented a search warrant or subpoena for access to bank records connected to a crime.
But since Richard Nixon signed the Bank Secrecy Act in 1970, the federal government gradually has required banks routinely to disclose transactions above a certain dollar amount and other alleged "suspicious activity" by customers, regardless of any showing of probable cause. Such information is shared, in turn, among law-enforcement agencies worldwide, and banks are forbidden to tell their customers when a report on them has been filed.
This type of government-required surveillance reached a high-water mark in the Clinton administration when the Federal Reserve and other agencies that regulate U.S. banks jointly issued the now-infamous "Know Your Customer" (KYC) regulations in 1998 (see "Snoops and Spies," Feb. 22, 1999). The rules would have required banks to determine "the source of a customer's funds" and the customer's "normal and expected transactions," to monitor each customer's account activity and to report to the feds any deviation from a customer's "historical patterns."
The agencies withdrew the rules after massive bipartisan opposition and more than 300,000 opposing comments. But, in the aftermath of the recent terrorist attacks, regulators were announcing that KYC was back even before the so-called emergency legislation was signed into law. At a late October conference of the American Bankers Association (ABA) in Arlington, Va., Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Vice President Suzanna Costello said that her agency already was "looking for . effective Know Your Customer" programs at the banks it regulates. "A year ago I wouldn't have even said, 'Know Your Customer,'" she told the gathering of top bank officials. "The KYC word was 'Kill Your Career' at the Fed. But I see that it's back."
While the new law carefully avoids references to KYC, it contains stiffer fines for financial institutions found to be in violation of "suspicious-activity" reporting on its customers. It also gives broad enforcement powers to the secretary of treasury and financial-regulatory agencies. And it expands the reporting requirements from banks to all "money-service businesses," such as convenience stores that sell money orders and cash cards, as well as stockbrokers and insurance companies. It also requires U.S. banks to know and investigate many of the customers of the foreign banks with which they do business.
The antiprivacy provisions are measures that have been pushed for years by Democrats such as Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Paul Sarbanes of Maryland. Senate Democrats reportedly threatened to scuttle the entire bill unless the Bush administration agreed to go along with these provisions, which many Republicans long have opposed.
Because so many congressional offices were closed as a result of the anthrax attacks, many members of Congress and their staffs did not even read and review provisions of the bill before they voted on it. As a result, privacy advocates say, it will be crucial for members of Congress and the Bush administration carefully to scrutinize the federal agencies as they develop regulations to implement the emergency law.
Already the banking industry is preparing for massive new regulation. KYC is "certainly coming back with something of a vengeance," said Elliot Berman, of the Milwaukee law firm of Godfrey & Kahn, who works in its Financial Institutions Practice Group, during another session of the ABA conference. "It has a new name: enhanced due diligence," he said. Although consumers still won't know if a "suspicious" withdrawal or deposit they made has been reported to the government, Berman said, they will see effects of the required profiling and monitoring in other ways.
One of the first casualties of the forthcoming regulations may be the speed and convenience of Internet banking. The idea of opening an account for instant use is going to go away, Berman said. "On Monday, I might sit down and open an account on NetBank, but my account probably won't be active until next Monday, when they've had a chance to do many of the things that they currently do if I sat down across the desk. [The Internet will be] just another delivery channel. That's all it's ever been, and now it's just going to look a lot more like the older delivery channels," he said.
Other conveniences that may go because of requirements for enhanced scrutiny include immediate payment when a loan is approved, Berman tells Insight. Richard Harvey, chief privacy officer for the Washington-area Chevy Chase Bank chain, tells Insight that more forms will be required for credit-card applications and car loans. He wonders how his bank will be able to comply with the enhanced-scrutiny requirements and not run afoul of privacy and discrimination rules such as Regulation B, which prohibits banks from determining an applicant's race for a credit card or consumer loan. "To ask everybody who applies for a credit card for such information as a copy of their driver's-license picture is a Reg B violation," he explains.
Nevertheless, many banking-industry insiders seem resigned to the loss of privacy and convenience for their customers as necessary for the fight against terrorism. "It's very similar to what's happening in airports," Berman says. "I think those same kinds of things are going to happen to the financial-services industry. For the legitimate customer it's going to be irritating and slow things down."
But some law-enforcement experts say that unlike airports, where scrutinizing every passenger potentially can prevent someone from getting onto a plane with a knife or a gun, routine surveillance of bank customers likely will do little to stop terrorist acts. Gary Aldrich, a retired FBI agent who heads the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberties, tells Insight that KYC programs are not worth the cost to the right of the people to privacy. "I am pro-law-enforcement, but I've seen the same problem throughout my FBI career: Punish everyone to send a message to one. I don't think it works," says Aldrich, who has written about the lax security measures for White House personnel under the Clinton administration. "I think it dilutes the government's ability actually to catch suspicious people because the flow of information into some central authority becomes so huge it cannot be analyzed fast enough to make any sense of it."
Aldrich is not the only one to call this flood of data stemming from the Bank Secrecy Act a problem. At the ABA conference luncheon speech, Treasury Undersecretary for Enforcement Jimmy Gurule noted that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the central database of bank reports now used by law-enforcement agencies, receives 13 million currency-transaction reports from banks every year.
"It is estimated that approximately 30 percent of those do not need to be filed under existing exemption regulations," Gurule says. "Proper use of the exemptions would provide law enforcement with data purged of meaningless reports. This would be extremely helpful in an age when law enforcement is inundated by more information than they can sometimes process."
Yet, in the same speech, Gurule praised the "landmark" money-laundering legislation, which will require the filing of even more reports. The law does give the treasury secretary the authority to create further exemptions from reporting requirements. But a Bank Secrecy Act compliance officer for a chain of banks in the Southeast tells Insight that the current incentive is to overreport because regulators come down hard when reports they believe should be filed aren't. The compliance officer also says that it would take time and require costly software upgrades to weed out transactions that meet the exemptions. "It's another level of scrutiny, another level of investigation," the compliance officer says.
Treasury spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos says Gurule wants to work with banks to streamline the filing process. In the meantime the Treasury Department has set up the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center and given banks a list of suspected terrorists to monitor in addition to those whose assets already have been frozen. Gurule praised bank cooperation with this effort.
Efforts like these, targeted at specific suspects, likely will bear more fruit than the widespread monitoring of all bank customers, experts say. The Free Congress Foundation's Jansen says the federal government needs to focus on those suspected of terrorism rather than mandating mass surveillance of everyone.
"We have no problem with law enforcement getting all of the information they need to bring these perpetrators to justice," he says. "But this gross surveillance of everyone all the time didn't prevent these tragedies, it's not going to prevent any in the future and it just diverts resources away from actually following the intelligence they do have."
Unfortunately, say Jansen and others, much that is in the money-laundering provisions of the new law has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. For the last few years, the Clinton administration, the European Union and left-wing Democrats such as Levin have wanted to crack down on "harmful tax competition" from such offshore banking centers as the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and Bermuda. In language virtually identical to a bill supported by the Clinton administration last year, the antiterrorism bill passed by the Democratic Senate let the treasury secretary include "special measures." These included sanctions on countries that "offer bank secrecy or special tax or regulatory advantages to nonresidents," that have a large volume of financial transactions relative to the size of their economies or that are "characterized as a tax haven or offshore banking or secrecy haven by credible international organizations."
House Republicans prevailed in getting specific references to the word "tax" removed from these sections, but some fear that "regulatory advantages" still could be construed to apply to a country's tax policy.
Never mind the fact that because a country offers low taxes and bank secrecy to foreigners doesn't mean it condones money laundering. Dan Mitchell, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and cofounder of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, points out that no major offshore financial center is on the international Financial Action Task Force's list of "noncooperative" jurisdictions in the fight against laundering of criminal proceeds. He says that some consider the United States a tax haven because it offers advantages to foreigners over residents by not taxing interest on their bank accounts.
To stop terrorism, Mitchell proposes mutual legal-assistance treaties with offshore financial centers. If they don't cooperate in stopping the flow of terrorist assets, the United States then has every right to impose sanctions, he says. "If we find out that some place is actually sheltering and harboring and is complicit in the protection of [terrorist assets], no ifs, ands or buts, we should crush someone like that."
Mitchell does not think Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill will use these provisions to go after low-tax countries. Yet observers note that the Bush administration changed its tune about much of its money-laundering strategy after Sept. 11. Before that, its 2001 National Money-Laundering Strategy, written in early September, expressed resistance to global KYC programs and crackdowns on tax havens, preferring to focus efforts on major money-laundering organizations. The report stated that "we do not have a system in place that objectively evaluates which strategies have proven to be the most effective."
After Sept. 11, the administration appeared to have been spooked, according to insiders. "The Bush administration has done a complete turnaround on the issue," says Bruce Zagaris, a partner at the Washington law firm of Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe. "There was a concern that he [Bush] was perceived as not as strong as the Democrats on money laundering."
Privacy advocates hope Bush will focus on terrorism and regain his bearings when issuing the regulations. They presume he will get good advice from National Economic Council Director Lawrence Lindsey. In a chapter of a Competitive Enterprise Institute book published last year, The Future of Financial Privacy, Lindsey noted that 100,000 reports are collected on bank customers for every one conviction of money laundering. "That ratio of 99,999-to-1," he wrote, "is something we normally would not tolerate as a reasonable balance between privacy and the collection of guilty verdicts."
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題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。