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BANKERS AS GOVERMENT SPIES - jun - 20, 2005 COMMENT: Bankers As Government Spies Dear A-Letter Reader: Fiduciaries play an extremely important role in the financial and legal systems that allow the modern world to operate with ease. Even so, the fiduciary has been around for over a thousand years and historic evidence of such activity can be found in the earliest records of ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece. A fiduciary is an agent that has a duty to act on behalf of others in a special relationship of trust, confidence, or responsibility. His or her obligation is to represent the best interests of the person who has placed trust in them, to do all possible to protect that trusting person from harm. It is worth repeating the obvious: a fiduciary can only represent that trusting person's interests. He cannot, at the same time, represent other parties with conflicting interests. Of course, a fiduciary is usually a person engaged in financial activities on behalf of others, such as a trustee for a trust administering funds for beneficiaries. Now when I was a kid growing up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the quintessential fiduciary was the local banker. At each of the two banks in my home town of Easton there was one man who managed the funds and also knew everyone in town, (and most of their secrets). These men were trusted and they earned that trust. Today, your banker, (if you bank in America), is a spy for the police and a not-so-secret agent of the government. He may take your money and cash your checks, but he is no longer a fiduciary for you -- he works for the money police, chief among them the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, better known as FinCEN. Speaking in Baltimore Tuesday, William Fox, the current head of FinCEN, told 1,300 US bankers that they are America's "eyes and ears" when it comes to spotting suspicious banking activity. And he was not just talking about terrorist cash, or drug money, or even the broader issue of money laundering in general. He was talking about YOU! And Mr. Fox complained that too many bankers were filing too many dreaded 'suspicious activity reports' (SARs0 that were unneeded. No wonder! FinCEN has imposed huge fines on US banks for not filing SARs; now nervous bankers are doing "defensive filing." Riggs Bank pleaded guilty in January to a felony charge of failing to report suspicious transactions involving foreigners and paid a $16 million fine. In  October, Birmingham, Alabama based AmSouth Bank was ordered to pay a $40 million fine for not filing SARs. Mr. Fox reminded his spies that under the law bankers now work for the government, not for their clients. His spies must be on the lookout for all "suspicious activities" -- a phrase so broad that almost anything comes within its definition. These bankers can be fined and jailed if they neglect reporting. And if they tell a client the government is investigating them, that too can land the banker in jail. There are pages of official descriptions of what is "suspicious" - from depositing lots of dirty dollars or small bills, to acting nervous or having sweaty hands when in line at a bank. On average, US banks file 12,000 SARs each month. Over a million have been filed since 1996 when the law took effect. FinCEN is said to get more than 140 million computerized financial records compiled from 21,000 banks and 200,000 other institutions including any bank wire or other transfer of US$10,000 or more which is automatically reported to FinCEN electronically. 12 million of these CTRs are filed annually. Records of all wire transfers already are mandated by law and available to the feds. Add to that 'know your customer' and SARs and banks are drowning in rules, reports and requirements. And we all pay. Financial services compliance costs for the PATRIOT Act anti-money laundering provisions is projected at $10.9 billion by the end of 2005. The International Monetary Fund estimates that $600 billion is laundered each year globally with $300 billion passing through US banks. Yet less than 2,000 cases based on all these filings have been initiated, even fewer convictions have resulted and few have involved charges of terrorism. All this massive invasion of privacy for what? Not for security, except for the security of billion dollar budgets for the national money police's ballooning bureaucracy that this frenzy has spawned. The 9-11 conspirators used their real names and their own US banks accounts and ATMs to finance the estimated $130,000 they spent. Yet the FBI and other government bureaucracies that already knew who some of them were did not, or could not, find or stop them. Folks, this is justification for moving some of your assets offshore and for opening an offshore bank account in a place where privacy still exists. You better do it while it's still legal to do so. Check my PS below. And forget about fiduciaries in America. They're long gone. That's the way it's looks from here. Bob Bauman, Editor

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