U.S. financial intelligence units need better access to tax data.
When Swiss banking giant UBS entered into a deferred prosecution agreement in 2009, paying $780 million for conspiring to help U.S. taxpayers hide offshore accounts, the case revealed a critical vulnerability in the United States’ approach to financial crime. The investigation succeeded largely because of a whistleblower—a former UBS banker—rather than systematic intelligence sharing between financial and tax authorities. Allegedly, Swiss bankers had travelled to the United States approximately 3,800 times in 2004 alone to market the benefits of Swiss banking secrecy laws—which would allow wealthy Americans to hide money from U.S. tax authorities—yet these patterns went undetected until someone inside the scheme came forward.
That year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published its Ten Global Principles for fighting tax crime, the first comprehensive framework for coordinating international tax enforcement. Tax crimes rarely exist in isolation. These crimes link money laundering, corruption, and organized crime, requiring coordinated responses across international agencies.
Fifteen years after the UBS agreement, however, gaps persist in the United States’ implementation of these principles. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the United States’ financial intelligence unit, collects vast amounts of suspicious activity reports and currency transaction data, yet legal barriers limit its access to tax information that would enhance the usefulness of these intelligence reports. These barriers undermine the OECD framework’s core premise: Effective tax crime enforcement requires seamless information sharing between tax authorities and financial intelligence units.
Under the Internal Revenue Code, tax return information receives stringent privacy and confidentiality protections, limiting disclosure even to other government agencies. Although FinCEN can share its data with the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), an IRS unit that investigates potential criminal tax violations, the reverse flow of information faces substantial procedural hurdles. IRS-CI must navigate complex approval processes before sharing tax data with FinCEN, even when those data could help identify broader criminal networks.
According to recent IRS-CI reports, more than 87 percent of cases recommended for prosecution between 2022 and 2024 involved Bank Secrecy Act filings, demonstrating the value of financial intelligence in tax enforcement. Yet when FinCEN detects suspicious patterns suggesting tax evasion within larger money laundering schemes, it lacks the tax context to develop comprehensive intelligence products for its law enforcement partners.
The OECD’s framework anticipated this challenge. The eighth principle explicitly calls for countries to establish mechanisms facilitating information sharing between tax authorities and financial intelligence units. The framework’s second edition, published in 2021, emphasized the importance of allowing Financial Intelligence Units timely access to information collected under automatic financial information exchange agreements, such as the Common Reporting Standard.
OECD member countries have implemented protocols allowing their Financial Intelligence Units controlled access to tax data for risk assessment and money laundering analysis, while maintaining appropriate confidentiality safeguards. The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, for instance, can access certain tax information maintained by the HM Revenue & Customs—the U.K.’s tax, payments, and customs authority—when investigating serious organized crime. These models show that information sharing and taxpayer protection need not be mutually exclusive.
Modernizing U.S. information-sharing frameworks would require carefully calibrated statutory amendments. The U.S. Congress could authorize FinCEN access to specific categories of tax data, such as information already reported under the Common Reporting Standard or data from high-risk jurisdictions, for analytical purposes only, not for civil tax enforcement. Strict rules and penalties for unauthorized disclosure could address privacy concerns while enabling the sharing of intelligence OECD framework envisions.
The stakes extend beyond individual investigations. Financial crime has grown increasingly sophisticated and international. Criminals exploit jurisdictional boundaries. When the IRS identifies a complex tax fraud scheme with international dimensions, FinCEN’s global network of FIU partners could help trace assets and identify co-conspirators, if FinCEN had sufficient context about the tax components driving the investigation.
Building this capacity becomes more urgent as new challenges emerge. The OECD’s 2022 Recommendation on the Ten Global Principles emphasizes tackling professional enablers’ lawyers, accountants, and financial advisors who architect sophisticated evasion schemes. Identifying these networks requires connecting tax violations to broader patterns of financial activity, exactly the type that benefits from integrating tax data with Bank Secrecy Act reporting.
The United States once led global efforts against financial crime through innovations such as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and aggressive sanctions enforcement. With the OECD’s tax crime framework, however, the United States lags internationally in enabling its financial intelligence unit to fully leverage available information. Addressing this gap would strengthen both tax enforcement and the broader fight against financial crime, while respecting legitimate privacy interests through careful statutory design.
Reform became apparent in October 2024, when TD Bank pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations and conspiracy to commit money laundering, paying $1.8 billion in penalties, the largest ever under the act. Between 2014 and 2024, TD Bank failed to monitor 92 percent of transaction volume, approximately $18.3 trillion in activity, enabling money laundering networks to move more than $670 million through the bank. Had FinCEN possessed timely access to relevant tax data about the individuals and entities involved, the tax evasion patterns underlying these money laundering schemes may have been identified sooner, potentially preventing years of criminal activity.
The OECD’s Ten Global Principles provide a roadmap. The question is whether U.S. policymakers will follow it.
