Political Quotes

“in conclusion, I simply want to say to the Members who may be listening to this discussion, what we are talking about here is a restaurant, a movie theater, a corner drugstore, a retail establishment. These are businesses that have been in the community for years and years. As a matter of course, every week, sometimes every day, they file large sums of cash. The very idea that we would impose, as we did in the Bank Safety Act, a requirement that the banks, every time this happens, file a report. As FinCEN estimated last year, it takes 25 minutes to prepare these reports, to review them, to catalog them and to file them. Then it takes the FBI or others, IRS, who administers this program, 5 to 6 minutes. So you are talking about, for the average small bank in a medium-sized town, as Mr. Hensarling said, you are talking about hundreds of hours of wages, not to speak of the time. As we have been hearing for 10 or 12 years, these reports have absolutely no usefulness in identifying money laundering, serious financial crimes, terrorist financing. It is past time that this Congress lifts what is a multimillion dollar burden on our financial institutions and, at the same time, allows law enforcement, directs law enforcement, in fact, to go after the bad guys. Focus attention on those nonroutine, nonstandard transactions.…”