A key challenge to the integrity of the U.S. financial system is jurisdictional arbitrage: bad actors use foreign financial institutions to engage in egregious crimes and money laundering and take advantage of deep U.S. financial markets and American taxpayers and businesses. The U.S. Treasury Department has long sought to prevent jurisdictional arbitrage by raising global anti-money laundering (AML) standards through the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and by placing on national-level regulators the responsibility for implementing heightened standards.
In “FinCEN Should Use Special Authority to Enable Better Compliance” (Bloomberg Law, 27 April 2026), Himamauli Das and co-author Brent Wible explain how, where national authorities fail to “up their game,” the Treasury’s AML watchdog, FinCEN (the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network), possesses the authority to serve as a “supervisor of last resort” and motivate foreign financial institutions to have effective AML programs. They also share how implementation of a more structured, remediation-oriented approach could preserve FinCEN’s deterrent effect while giving the market clearer signals about expectations, timelines, and end-states—helping reduce unintended harm to legitimate customers and counterparties.
Read the Bloomberg Law article.