Yet the closing of accounts for these types of businesses runs the risk of effectively denying banking services to many categories of legitimate customers. Banking organizations have also begun to file "defensive" SARs in an effort to avoid any criticism of their judgment about whether some activity is illegal or suspicious, and to avoid sanctions for failing to file particular SARs.
The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has reported that these defensive filings threaten to clutter the SAR database with information that cannot be properly analyzed due to the volume. Bank regulators and FinCEN recognize that no process for fraud or money-laundering detection and control can reasonably be expected to perfectly detect every transaction.