on charges that included bribe-taking and defrauding the city through the sale of public property.
Prior to this reporting, very few SARs had ever been revealed. The FinCEN Files encompass more than 2,100. BuzzFeed News is not publishing the SARs in full because they contain information about people or companies that are not under suspicion, but who were swept up in the banks’ searches. A subset of the documents is being published, with redactions, to support reporting in specific stories.
Robert Mazur, a former federal special agent and an expert in money laundering, said that making this material public"could enhance national security, aid future investigations, and encourage institutions to more consistently adhere to SAR filing requirements,” and"will hopefully get people who are in a position of power to correct an apparent systemic failure.”The United States Treasury Department in Washington, DC.