There will also be a Suspicious Activity and Review Unit within each group that will work to disseminate intelligence gathered from the SARs and distribute the information to our field agents. The U.S. Customs Money Laundering Coordination Center, or MLCC, is now operational and will soon provide 24 hour deconfliction support to all U.S. Customs undercover financial investigations. By doing so, the MLCC acts as a safety mechanism so that all Customs undercover actions are tracked and coordinated in real time, thus ensuring that our numerous money laundering investigations don t conflict with one another and that undercover agents are not unknowingly pursuing the same target. The MLCC also analyzes information provided by these operations in order to more fully develop targets and expand investigations. As outlined in the National Money Laundering Strategy, the Money Laundering Coordination Center is also the repository for all U.S. Government information relating to the Black Market Peso Exchange.
Information is gathered on, among other targets, money brokers, bank accounts, and trade data.
The information is analyzed by Customs and targets, systems, and patterns are detected and sent to our field offices for further investigation. There have been a number of committees in Congress that have worked with Customs, Treasury, and Justice in proposing legislation that enables us to continue the fight against money laundering. And I would like to thank you for those efforts. As I have just outlined, Customs conducts a myriad of money laundering investigations, ranging from bulk cash smuggling cases to money remitters to the Black Market Peso Exchange. We believe all of the proposals encompassed in The Money Laundering Act of 2000 will have a dramatic and positive impact on the way money-laundering investigations are conducted by the U.S. Customs Service .