Casinos improve efforts to fight money laundering
By J.D. Morris, Las Vegas Sun
The gaming industry’s fight against criminals who want to use casinos to disguise illegal money was front and center Thursday at the Paris resort.
There, industry leaders and government officials gathered for a conference that addressed how casinos are handling their obligations under anti-money-laundering law.
The verdict, according to one government official: Casinos have done a better job lately of reporting suspicious financial activity, but there’s still room for improvement.
Last year, the director of the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — or FinCEN — spoke at this same Bank Secrecy Act conference and reminded the casino industry of how it needs to instill itself with a “culture of compliance” when it comes to money-laundering law.
The casino industry decimated the regulatory compliance machinery in the last decade. They marginalized and minimized any oversight by shifting the work to untrained and centralized workers with no direct contact or understanding of what they were looking for. They intentionally caused the problems with transactions falling through the cracks. Typical of corporate groupthink, they have no idea what they are doing when they slice up an important department like Regulatory Compliance. In Nevada, when Reg 6A was replaced by the Federal Title 31, absolute chaos ensued and the casinos reacted the way they always do, cut staff and deny any responsibility. Then, promote the incompetent middle management and give them huge raises. Then, they want to talk about how they are “improving”. It is easy to show improvement after complete failure. More corporate nonsense.