Washington, May 11: The U.S. Treasury Department hopes to conclude an agreement with the European Union by July to expand its ability to search for movements of large sums of money that might be related to terrorism, a senior Treasury official said on Monday.
Adam Szubin, director of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), said that since the beginning of the year, a global messaging service maintained by banks has kept about half of its data in Europe.
With only half the data stored in the United States, it has complicated OFAC’s ability to track movements between banks of large sums that might be suspicious. Previously, all the data collected by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transactions, or SWIFT, was stored in the United States.
Szubin said that the extra difficulty involved in getting access to the SWIFT data essentially creates a security gap. “This is of great concern to us, in Treasury and within the Obama administration,” he said.
Szubin said that discussions were underway with the EU on negotiating a new agreement to give OFAC access to all the SWIFT data on financial transactions.
SWIFT is a cooperative maintained by more than 9,000 banking organizations, securities firms and corporate customers, designed to help track movements of large sums relatively easily between banks or other members.
“I’m hopeful that in the July timeframe” an agreement can concluded between the United States and the EU, Szubin said, adding there also was interest among many European nations in giving authorities more room to track suspicious funds transfers.
–Agencies