This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 18th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. The Bank Secrecy Act is aimed at curtailing

financial crime. As a side effect, every American with a bank account has to give up a massive amount of

financial privacy.

So how well has that trade-off?

Paid off.

Cato's Nick Anthony says there's precious little evidence that Americans should have to hand

over financial data to the feds in exchange for benefits that the government largely avoids

quantifying. we spoke last week

we don't get any answers about what crimes it's stopping

and we don't get any reassurances that this privacy tradeoff is actually one that's worthwhile.

Myself and others have been asking for years what exactly is the success rate of the reports that are filed as required by the Bank Secrecy Act

and just about every time the government hasn't been able to give any answer.

All right, so what are the agencies that are charged with enforcing the Bank Secrecy Act?

What do they hang their hat on when it comes time for, you know, nosy little policy people like

you come snooping around and asking for answers?

So primarily this is falling under the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network or FinCEN and

we've asked a lot of times what do you justify this under and you'll get an anecdote. You'll get one

case here or one case there. There's even a full enforcement awards program

that they've created to highlight a dozen cases.

And the big problem though is, okay, you gave me 12 cases, but there are 26 million reports filed each year.

There needs to be more than 12 to prove that this is effective

...