America's Credit Unions is urging Congress to modernize Bank Secrecy Act requirements, arguing outdated anti-money laundering rules are placing growing compliance burdens on credit unions while limiting the effectiveness of financial crime monitoring.
In advance of a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing Thursday on modernizing the Bank Secrecy Act, the trade group sent lawmakers a series of recommendations aimed at reducing regulatory complexity while improving law enforcement efficiency.
Among the organization's top priorities is increasing Currency Transaction Report and Suspicious Activity Report thresholds. America's Credit Unions endorsed legislation from Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., that would raise the CTR threshold from $10,000 to $30,000 and increase the SAR threshold from $5,000 to $10,000, while indexing the CTR threshold for inflation.
The group also called for simplified reporting forms, streamlined filing windows for smaller credit unions and a "CTR-Lite" option for long-standing, low-risk members.
Additional recommendations include revisiting FinCEN's marijuana-related SAR filing requirements, formalizing recently issued customer due diligence relief and improving the quality of identifiers included in 314(a) information-sharing requests.
America's Credit Unions argued current reporting requirements often overwhelm smaller institutions with repetitive filings that provide limited investigative value while diverting resources away from detecting higher-risk financial crimes.
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