# FinCEN The **Financial Crimes Enforcement Network** is the bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department charged with collecting and analyzing financial transactions to combat money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crime. Established in 1990 under the Bank Secrecy Act framework, FinCEN is the U.S. government's central anti-money-laundering (AML) intelligence agency — the repository for the **Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs)** that banks are required to file whenever they detect potentially illicit transactions. FinCEN appears in the knowledge base in three distinct registers: 1. **As the agency whose leaked SARs powered the [[FinCEN Files]] investigation (September 2020)** — exposing that major banks (HSBC, JPMorgan, [[Deutsche Bank]], Standard Chartered, Bank of New York Mellon) had moved more than $2 trillion in flagged-suspicious transactions over nearly two decades, even after being fined for prior AML violations. The leak exposed not bank wrongdoing alone but FinCEN's structural inability to act on the warnings it received. 2. **As the agency responsible for implementing the [[Corporate Transparency Act]] (2021)** — the post-[[Panama Papers]] U.S. response requiring shell companies to disclose beneficial ownership to a FinCEN registry. The law was struck down in March 2024 (*National Small Business United v. Yellen*) and was administratively eviscerated by the [[Trump 2.0]] Treasury Department in March 2025, leaving the U.S. without a functional beneficial-ownership registry as of 2026. 3. **As an under-resourced choke point** in the U.S. AML system — perennially understaffed relative to the volume of SARs filed (over 2 million annually), with a small analytical workforce trying to triage filings against U.S. law enforcement priorities. The FinCEN Files documented that the agency's actual investigative response to SARs is, in most cases, no response at all. ## See Also - [[FinCEN Files]] — the 2020 leak of FinCEN SAR records - [[Corporate Transparency Act]] — the post-Panama-Papers U.S. response FinCEN was tasked with implementing - [[Money Laundering]] / [[Offshore Financial Secrecy]] — the phenomena FinCEN is supposed to detect