exclusive
Finance Minister Lindner promised that the new Federal Financial Crimes Office should be a “milestone” in the fight against money laundering. Now he has it Contrasts-Information a key digital project worth several hundred million euros was canceled.
A program should have detected suspicious financial transactions in the future – with the help of artificial intelligence. Now it’s apparently not even being developed. According to research by the central project to combat money laundering worth several hundred million euros ARD political magazine Contrasts fell victim to austerity pressure.
The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), which reports to the Federal Ministry of Finance, launched the call for tenders for the planned program in 2021 via the “Bundal Information Technology Center” (ITZ Bund). It is entitled “Renewal of the FIU information network”. According to documents that Contrasts available, the ITZ Bund stopped the proceedings on September 1st. The reason given is: “Budget funds for the project were subsequently lost.”
When asked, the General Customs Directorate responsible for the FIU replied that it “could not provide any information on the status of the award procedure”. In principle, “confidentiality” is agreed between the bidders and the contracting authorities in the area of defense and security. The Federal Ministry of Finance announced that it had “no additions to the response from the General Customs Directorate”.
Scholz emphasized the relevance of the project
The then Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz had already made it clear in the Finance Committee shortly before the 2021 federal election how relevant the topic is for combating financial crime. When it comes to combating money laundering, it will not be possible to adequately evaluate the available data without sophisticated “world-class AI tools”.
Banks and other so-called “obligated parties” such as notaries are reporting more and more suspicious transactions to the FIU because they are legally obliged to do so. In 2021, the FIU received almost 300,000 suspicious activity reports. These financial transactions are checked to see whether they are the result of criminal activity.
This requires a comparison with police databases and population registration data – a complex process that experts expect can be carried out much more efficiently with an AI-based program. So far, there have been large backlogs in the processing of suspected money laundering cases in the responsible FIU, which is mainly due to manual processing and a lack of access to police databases.
“Threat to internal security”
The money laundering expert Andreas Frank criticized the halting of the procurement process Contrasts now as a “threat to internal security” because organized crime and terrorist financiers could continue to launder and smuggle money. In addition, the process is an “incredible tax waste”.
At times you should Contrasts-Information that up to 50 people from the federal government alone were involved in the two-year process. The tender is said to have included around 1,000 pages and a requirements catalog with more than 2,800 digital functions. Apparently the requirements were so extensive that they ultimately exceeded the federal government’s financial framework.
“Dampener for the work of the FIU”
The criminal policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Sebastian Fiedler, criticized Contraststhat there will soon be a law that allows the use of AI programs in the FIU – but such a program is apparently not available.
Opposite Contrasts He explained his concerns: “I don’t want to give the impression that all of the FIU’s problems would be solved with AI software,” but if the software were missing “that would put a damper on the work of the FIU.” Nevertheless, he is counting on the new management of the FIU to work hard on improvements. He is also counting on further improvements in the planned law.