WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is considering requiring U.S. banks, for the first time, to inform the government of all their customers' international wire transfers, regardless of possible terrorist ties, a Treasury Department official said Tuesday.
Such mandatory reporting would mark a major expansion of the government's efforts to comb financial data to fight terrorism and other international crimes. Depending on how the program is structured, it could mean that banks would be forced to turn over data on millions of transactions that they are now required to keep secret.
The department has been studying the feasibility of such a project since early 2005, when the idea first surfaced in media reports. As part of a plan to reform the intelligence community, Congress in late 2004 authorized the Treasury Department to consider requiring banks to turn over data on "certain cross-border electronic transmittals of funds."
Officials now say they are within a few weeks of deciding whether to proceed. Banking industry officials think that the department wants to move ahead in some fashion, and a top Treasury Department official hinted Tuesday that officials were considering a trial run.
The proposal shows that despite controversy, the administration is still pushing for new tools to better use technology for accessing previously confidential data to combat terrorism and other international crimes.
The issue surfaced Tuesday during congressional testimony about another program that the Treasury Department had used to monitor terrorist finances. That program, involving an international banking consortium known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, was disclosed last month by The Times and other media outlets.
The program under consideration would capture international transactions involving only U.S. banks, while the SWIFT system logs transfers across any international borders. But the Treasury Department would be free to use the data for investigations and crime-fighting beyond terrorism cases.
"We can use that information for terrorism, money laundering -- all sorts of law enforcement purposes," Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, told the House Financial Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations. "And we can do all kinds of the things that people traditionally think about when they think about data mining in terms of looking for trend analysis, suspicious activity and the like."
