ACU Pushes Back On Treasury Citizenship Check Idea For FI Accounts
By CU Today Staff —
WASHINGTON--America's Credit Unions President/CEO Scott Simpson sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent outlining how credit unions currently work to verify members' identities, following comments that an Executive Order is in the works to add citizenship verification to new and existing financial institution accounts.
"Credit unions already comply with the Customer Identification Program (CIP) requirements established under the Bank Secrecy Act and implemented by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network," Simpson wrote. "The existing CIP framework requires credit unions to obtain and verify identifying information for each person opening an account and provides a risk-based approach that has functioned effectively for more than two decades. Expanding these obligations to require the collection and verification of citizenship information would impose additional operational, technological, and member-service burdens on credit unions, and those burdens would fall particularly hard on smaller institutions with limited compliance resources."
Should the Administration move forward with an Executive Order, Simpson outlined recommendations to minimize the impact on credit unions:
Originally reported by CU Today.