Bank Secrecy Act Crushes Small Businesses

Warrantless financial surveillance should be shut down, not expanded.

The Bank Secrecy Act doesn’t just violate our freedoms; it also crushes small businesses.

The Trump administration expanded financial surveillance last year by decreasing the reporting thresholds for currency transaction reports from $10,000 to just $200. After public pushback and a legal challenge by the Institute for Justice, the threshold was raised to $1,000.

Yet, the damage was done. Evangelina Ornelas told The Guardian that her business was already destroyed. Ornelas runs a small, family-owned grocery store that used to have long lines of customers waiting for their money services (e.g., check cashing and remittances). Those lines have dried up, however, due to privacy concerns under the new surveillance.

Another small business said the policy is “going to put us out of business” because it has been swamped by the new reporting requirements now that so many transactions need to be filed with the government. To put that into perspective, one small business estimated that it would likely go from filing nine reports per week to filing 50,000 reports per week under the initial order. That is nothing short of an impossible standard to comply with.

Advocates of the surveillance argue that it is necessary to stop cartels, terrorists, and money launderers. However, the data are not on their side. Financial institutions filed 28.7 million reports under the Bank Secrecy Act last year. Yet, only 275 investigations were launched by the Internal Revenue Service because of a report. Adding insult to injury, the government has been unable to say how many criminals have been stopped.

Rob Johnson of the Institute for Justice didn’t mince words when asked what he thought of this financial surveillance system: “It’s invasive, and it’s unconstitutional.” Johnson is right. Warrantless financial surveillance should be shut down, not expanded.