ICBA: FinCEN underestimates information collection burden 

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network underestimates the regulatory burden of information sharing requests between banks and law enforcement under the USA PATRIOT Act, ICBA told the agency. 

Time Commitment: Responding to FinCEN’s proposed renewal of Bank Secrecy Act information sharing regulations, ICBA said although FinCEN estimates that the average time to process a request per subject is only three and a half minutes, community banks report that the burden associated with 314(a) compliance is far greater, sometimes taking multiple hours for a single request. 

ICBA Recommendations: In a letter to FinCEN, ICBA: 

• Urged FinCEN to adopt a more realistic assessment that accounts for differences in institution size, technological infrastructure, and operational capacity. 

• Said a tiered approach to burden estimation would better reflect the diversity of the financial sector and ensure that compliance expectations are aligned with actual resource demands. 

Past ICBA Advocacy: ICBA in 2022 told FinCEN that its proposal improperly implies that there is little to no burden associated with Section 314(a) requests, though such requests can take several hours at community banks with smaller staffs and without automated processes, particularly for institutions seeking to minimize false-positive matches.