Two Senators question U.S. agency’s ability to block terrorist money

Two Senators question U.S. agencyÆs ability to block terrorist money    The ranking members of the U.S. Senate’s Finance Committee have asked publicly if the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is part of the Treasury Department, has the ability to block terrorist money.
   Sen. Charles E. Grassey (Republican-Iowa), chairman of the Senate panel, and Sen. Max Baucus (Democrat-Montana), the committee’s senior minority member, expressed concerns about OFAC’s performance in a letter released to The Associated Press.
   The Senators cited alleged sloppy record keeping by OFAC, a failure to provide data to Congress, and the agency’s reliance on voluntary compliance by banks to impose sanctions against suspected terrorists.
   After an internal investigation in 2002, OFAC decided it had the legal authority to test the compliance of banks with sanctions. The senators said the agency had not taken steps to do so.
   “This leaves OFAC in a position of not knowing what it does not know,” the two senators said in their letter to Richard Newcomb, the director of OFAC.
   “While many financial institutions report their own violations when they are detected, we do not have the luxury of assuming that all financial institutions do this,” the senators said.
   An OFAC spokesman told Shippers’ NewsWire on Friday that Newcomb and other officials of the agency were on vacation and had no comment.
   OFAC has the duty to freeze bank accounts and other financial assets of individuals and companies that are considered to be enemies of the U.S. Once the names of such people or companies appear on an OFAC list, Congress has ordered all financial institutions to block their money.