About the FinCEN Files investigation

It took a team of 400 journalists from around the globe to tell the story of The FinCEN Files.

But it all began with a leak of documents to the online news organization Buzzfeed News. Buzzfeed shared the documents, banking records of “suspicious” money transfers, with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which assembled a team of reporters from around the world, including the Miami Herald, el Nuevo Herald and their parent, McClatchy. They dug into the files.

The records revealed the role of global banks in industrial-scale money laundering — and the bloodshed and suffering that flow in its wake.

Drawing on a cache of secret financial intelligence reports, the global investigation documented how banks’ profit motives overwhelmed their legal obligations to stop blood-soaked dirty money flowing from drug cartels, corrupt regimes, arms traffickers and other international criminals — and how a broken U.S.-led enforcement system perpetuates business as usual.

The records include more than 2,100 suspicious activity reports, or SARs, filed by global banks to the U.S. Treasury Department’s intelligence unit, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN.

ICIJ and the other news organizations spent 16 months organizing and analyzing the documents. ICIJ and its partners collected additional leaked documents from sources, reading through voluminous court and archival records and interviewing hundreds of people, including crime fighters and crime victims.

A former U.S. Treasury Department official, Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, from Virginia, has been charged with conspiring to unlawfully disclose documents to BuzzFeed News.

BuzzFeed News has not commented on its source.

The FinCEN Files investigation was able to trace banks’ roles in hiding money looted from government treasuries, scammed from pensioners, and generated through drug sales, illegal gold mining and other illegal activities.

The project tells how the U.S. Department of Justice and other government authorities perpetuate the status quo by imposing fines for money laundering that are a fraction of profits earned from it. With Groundhog Day-like regularity, ICIJ found, the DOJ approves lax settlements that defer prosecution of banks and decline altogether prosecution of responsible executives.

Because of their access to the U.S. Federal Reserve System, global banks’ U.S. operations serve as switchboard operators for dollar transactions, allowing them to see who is sending what money where and when.

The FinCEN Files represent less than 0.02 percent of the more than 12 million suspicious activity reports that financial institutions filed between 2011 and 2017.

The sweeping, unprecedented leak shows banks moved more than $2 trillion in payments between 1999 and 2017 that they themselves believed were suspicious, plus hundreds of spreadsheets, involving financial institutions with flagged clients in more than 170 countries. SARs reflect concerns by watchdogs within banks and financial institutions and are not necessarily indicative of any criminal conduct or other wrongdoing.

Even when they file a SAR (which does not by itself stop the money flows), they often don’t do it until long after the money’s gone. ICIJ’s analysis shows that the banks waited a median of 166 days — more than five months — after spotting a suspicious transaction to alert FinCEN.

The FinCEN Files dataset is a sprawling jumble of more than 2,600 files, including 2,100 narrative reports of varying quality that reveal the private concerns of global bank anti-money-laundering compliance departments about certain transactions, along with attached spreadsheets of sometimes hundreds of lines of raw transaction data. And many spreadsheets, filled with names, bank names, figures and dates, came unattached to any narrative that would provide a reason for their inclusion.

According to BuzzFeed News, some of the records were gathered as part of U.S. congressional investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election; others were gathered following requests to FinCEN from law enforcement agencies.

ICIJ’s collaboration mined the narratives of the FinCEN Files SARs and created more than 55,000 records of data structured into fixed fields that include details on more than 200,000 transactions flagged by the banks in the SARs. The effort resulted in an unprecedented dataset that touches regions across the globe. The leak also includes reports, written by FinCEN, called Kleptocracy Weekly, that provided additional perspective on the SARs.

This story was originally published September 21, 2020 at 1:37 PM with the headline "About the FinCEN Files investigation."