Biden Increases 50% Budget for FinCEN to Omit Financial Crimes
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President Joe Biden of the USA is pushing a plan for a 50% increase in the budget set aside for the Financial Crime Enforcement Network to improve its efforts against the rising financial crimes.Â
FinCEN has recently called for new regulation that would implement Know Your Customer (KYC) measures for digital currency exchanges. The measures require the exchanges to perform KYC checks on the private digital currency wallets. This initiative will put transparency on more digital currency wallet consumers.Â
This move to increase the budget will provide the funds of $191 million to the agency. This would be an up from the original budget of $64 million for the year. The budget has increased in hopes that it will assist the agency to improve its measures in identifying the illicit actors and fill the gaps in the financial reporting requirements.
With this increase in the budget, the government also hopes that the agency would be able to build a database to trace the ownership structure of the companies. This would help to avoid the glare of the regulators and other authorities by uncovering the use of complex company structure.Â
However, the proposed increase in the budget is yet to be approved by Congress lawmakers. It is expected that President Biden will provide more details regarding the proposal later this year.Â
This is the recent development between the FinCEN and digital currency sector after the series of measures proposed in the last few months including the latest proposal that would require the citizens to report any digital currency amount they have overseas.Â
The cryptocurrency community has already opposed the proposed KYC regulations on private wallet. Many stakeholders believe that the move to regulate crypto wallets will only create difficult incentives and will only encourage the people to avoid the regulated operators altogether.  Â
Despite the opposition and the backlash, FinCEN still remains unmoved about the proposals and claims that the steps are necessary to prevent financial criminals from taking advantage of digital currencies. The move will assist the agency to better tackle the rise in financial crimes done through digital currencies like Bitcoin.
