Money-Laundering Risk Of Hedge Funds Gauged
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Saturday, November 1, 2008; Page D03
Seven years ago the Patriot Act required every financial institution to establish a program to combat money-laundering.
But the roughly $2 trillion hedge-fund industry today remains free of any such government restrictions, and this week the Treasury Department formally withdrew its once proposed rules.
"Hedge funds do represent some risk because their operations and the identity of investors are generally not very transparent," said Steve Hudak, a spokesman for the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the Treasury Department. But "that risk needs to be studied and carefully assessed prior to implementing any anti-money-laundering regulations."
Hedge funds, which are largely unregulated investment pools whose investors are often wealthy individuals or sophisticated financial firms, have drawn increased scrutiny during the financial crisis.
Hedge funds need regulation "to make sure the incentives are right for them and others to do the right thing,'' Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of a House committee investigating the global credit crisis, said last week. "Certainly we need more transparency.''
There are several reasons the Treasury has been delayed in requiring hedge funds to adopt money-laundering measures.
For one thing, because the industry is unregulated there are no government examiners to enforce the measures.
For another, hedge funds are indirectly regulated because they do business through bank and other financial firms that are required to monitor transactions for possible money-laundering.
"We do have a line of sight on these transactions," Hudak said.
One key reason for the delay, moreover, is that the risk that a terrorist group might use a hedge fund to launder money is deemed relatively small.
For many terrorists, hedge funds may be too risky or require too large an initial investment to be useful.
"It's less likely that you'll see terrorists putting money in hedge funds," said Dennis M. Lormel, former chief of the financial crimes section at the FBI, now a consultant at IPSA International, a financial investigative consulting firm.
