Cooperate with Law Enforcement Agencies and Watch Act of 2019

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, first, let me thank Chairwoman Waters for her work on this bill. I am delighted the House is considering this important bill, H.R. 758, which I have had the pleasure to work on over the past year with my good friend from Illinois, Congressman Foster.

As a former community banker, I have dealt with the conflict of wanting to help law enforcement agencies when receiving a keep open letter, but not being able to because of the need to comply with the requirements set forth by a regulator, frequently and often in the middle of a bank exam.

Today, the overall purpose of this bill is to support law enforcement and reduce money laundering and terrorist financing through our banking system. That is why, along with my friend Mr. Foster, I was pleased to introduce this, as the chairwoman said, narrow, commonsense bill, which enables partnerships without repercussions between law enforcement and our local financial institutions.

This legislation allows law enforcement to monitor cash flows associated with criminal investigations at financial institutions. Under the Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering regulations, banks face strict rules for managing accounts so that they cannot facilitate money laundering, terrorism financing, drug running, and other illegal activities.

Sometimes, banks receive notices from law enforcement agencies known as keep open letters to encourage them to keep an account open so that law enforcement can monitor what they think to be and suspect to be criminal activity and track the payments for better monitoring.

I have heard recently from banks that they are seeing an increase in the number of keep open letters, many of which can be attributable to new human trafficking investigations. Allowing banks to keep these accounts open will help stop these terrible criminal actions.

Currently, if banks help law enforcement and comply with the keep open letter request, they face the risk of being penalized by someone from the same regulatory agency. This commonsense bill supports those efforts by law enforcement by allowing financial institutions to comply with such requests to maintain a suspicious account without being penalized in the middle of a bank exam. Under this bill, no Federal department or agency may take an adverse supervisory action with respect to the financial institution that is keeping the account open.

As the chairwoman said, last Congress, this legislation unanimously passed out of our House Financial Services Committee and passed under the suspension of the rules. The legislation was also included as a provision last Congress in the JOBS 3.0 package.

Chairman Waters and former Chairman Hensarling made fighting illicit finance a priority for our committee. Given the strong bipartisanship, I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this measure. It will give law enforcement the tools it needs to prosecute bad actors who are exploiting our financial system.

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Mr. HILL of Arkansas. Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers on this side of the aisle.

Mr. Speaker, in closing, I would just simply urge, with the work done by Mr. Foster and myself, and with thanks to the Chair, that we have strong bipartisan support in favor of H.R. 758, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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