US armour

How effective are US law enforcement and intelligence in combating money laundering? Andrew Cave investigates.

After 9/11, the United States positioned itself at the centre of the international crackdown on money laundering and terrorist financing, and its legal response has been extensively documented in past issues of MLB . But what of its federal police and intelligence agencies? Unsurprisingly, they have been busy in fighting and detecting movements of illicit money, with publicly-available statistics bearing evidence of this effort. In 2005, depository institutions filed 958 suspicious activity reports, based on suspicions of terrorist financing alone, and as of April last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had more than 1,200 pending cases involving some aspect of money laundering.