Not Orange County Choppers, the Office of the Central Comptroller. That is, one of the many regulatory agencies tasked with making the life of bankers everwhere sufficiently difficult.
Observation 1: Banks are responsible for enforcement of laws against money laundering. If a bank fails in due-dilligence, as defined by the OCC and rather nebulously at that, and one of its customers is caught laundering money the bank can be fined substantially or even shut down. Note also that “money laundering” includes illegal activities performed with legally procured funds. The OCC also maintains a list of businesses considered “high risk”, any business type on this list must be subjected to extra scrutiny by banks. High Risk currently includes car dealers; doctors’ offices, attorneys, and accountants are soon to be added.
The sorts of information the OCC requires us to gather can be pretty invasive, especially to small firms, and the new requirements are a bit at odds with the relationship banking philosophy of my employer. We also have to be extra dilligent due to our size and location, the OCC says so. The OCC will also perform periodic audits to make sure we’re following all the rules. Eventhough we have been accused of no crime, the OCC demands that they look through our records every so often. Imagine if the police came to your house every year or two, demanded to look around while holding you at gunpoint, and that you would be prosecuted for any crimes of which they found evidence during this search. Sounds like a pretty clear violation of your rights, doesn’t it? Happens to banks every day.
Don’t get me wrong, preventing money laundering is, I suppose, a noble enough goal, but why should banks be forced to enforce the law? It’s not our job to catch criminals, it’s our job to provide service far in excess of our customers’ expectations and to maximize shareholder value. Why doesn’t the OCC devote its massive resources to following criminals around and obtaining the bank records of criminals via court-order instead of pecking around looking to make criminals out of bankers for not enforcing rules the OCC itself devised?
Observation 2: There is a LAW about the size, dimensions, and placement of check endorsements. That’s right. A law. Turn over one of your checks sometime and you’ll notice that the back is clearly divided into sections. There’s a law about that, do we really need a law about that? I’m pretty damn certain that somebody would’ve come up with a standardized formatting without the government handing down a mandate.
There are other stupid banking laws, I shall post about them as I become aware.
