The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) revealed final week, on June 7 and 8, two notices in search of feedback concerning the company’s plans to gather extra info from banks and different establishments on crypto property and identification theft pink flags.
The threat of cash laundering related to cryptocurrencies has been a continuing concern for regulators for the previous couple of years. Just final week, U.S. policymakers held two completely different hearings in Capitol Hill concerning the position of cryptocurrencies in ransomware assaults and about illicit finance of terrorist actions.
One of the suggestions from Sen. Gary Peters, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, in a latest report on this situation was that U.S. companies ought to have extra knowledge to combat these crimes.
Just just a few days after this advice, the OCC revealed a discover within the Federal Register asserting that it’s introducing adjustments to the Bank Secrecy Act/Money Laundering Risk Assessment, often known as the Money Laundering Risk (MLR) System, to gather extra info.
The MLR System enhances the flexibility of examiners and financial institution administration to establish and consider Bank Secrecy Act/Money Laundering and Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctions dangers related to banks’ merchandise, providers, clients, and areas. Consequently, the MLR threat evaluation is a crucial device for the OCC’s Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-Money Laundering and OFAC supervision actions as a result of it permits the company to raised establish these establishments, and areas inside establishments, which will pose heightened threat.
According to the company, banks can even profit from the reporting of MLR knowledge as it is going to help within the managing of the banks’ BSA/AML packages and present a place to begin for banks to develop their threat assessments.
The OCC is now proposing to gather new MLR info in its annual Risk Summary Form (RSF). For 2022, the RSF will embody three new merchandise and providers in crypto property: custody, stablecoin issuance and stablecoin funds. The OCC can be including three new buyer varieties underneath the cash transmitters class: clients that settle for or transmit cryptocurrency; crypto ATM operators; and crypto asset exchanges.
The OCC will accumulate this knowledge for group and belief banks supervised by the regulator. The assortment might be totally automated, making knowledge entry fast and environment friendly and offering digital data for all events, the company stated within the discover. The company is in search of feedback on this proposal till Aug. 8.
Read extra: US Lawmakers Take on Crypto Ransom Payments
Identity Theft Red Flags
The second initiative revealed by the OCC is on identification theft. According to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2033 (FACT Act) completely different companies, together with the OCC, are required to situation pointers for monetary establishments and collectors concerning identification theft with respect to their account holders and clients and replace these as usually as needed.
The FACT Act additionally requires the OCC and different companies to establish patterns, practices and particular types of exercise that point out the doable existence of identification theft. Banks and monetary establishments even have obligations. For occasion, OCC-regulated monetary establishments want to ascertain an Identity Theft Prevention Program designed to detect, stop, and mitigate identification theft in reference to accounts. Financial establishments are additionally inspired to contemplate these pointers when creating their Identity Theft Prevention packages, particularly provided that the primary program have to be accepted by the establishments’ board of administrators.
While the rules on identification theft pink flags have been first revealed in 2007, the companies are in search of suggestions from the general public till July 7 to find out whether or not the knowledge collected for these functions is sufficient. This is the second time the OCC has issued a discover for feedback on this subject as the primary discover, revealed in March, was closed with out receiving any feedback.
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