Wes Vernon
Thursday, June 28, 2001

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, DeLay congratulates the Bush administration for refusing to go along with an attempt by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to sanction low-tax nations for their supposedly "unfair" competition against the high-tax welfare states. NewsMax.com has written extensively about this. (Global Thuggery, Tentacles of World Government Closing In on You? Will Bush Let French Bureaucrats Take Your Money? Reject Global Tax Police, Armey Says, U.S. Rebuffs Tax-Happy European Bureaucrats)

Now the House leader wants the secretary to "extend that opposition to the anti-privacy information schemes being advocated by the OECD and the EU" (European Union).

That is a reference to a proposal by the Paris-based OECD for each of its 28 member nations to increase bank surveillance of customers through "Know Your Customer" practices.

To Lisa Dean, a privacy specialist at the Free Congress Foundation, this is an old battle that has to be refought in the public arena yet again. In 1999 the federal government proposed a "Know Your Customer" program that would have jailed your banker if he did not keep close tabs on your deposits and withdrawals and report any "unusual" transactions.

This was met with a howl of protest by the public, resulting in the plan's demise. But like Dracula, it keeps returning from different directions.

"For an international organization to twist the arms of democratic nations in order to get them to adopt policies that conflict with the rights and freedoms of their citizens is no surprise. But the fact that these countries, including our own, are considering them is," Dean writes.

President Bush's economic affairs adviser Larry Lindsey has repeatedly denounced "Know Your Customer" as an ineffective program.

As NewsMax.com has reported in the past, many of the so-called suspicious transactions have dealt with amounts of less than $10,000, the limit required by law enforcement to begin investigations of citizens.

Bottom line: Banks have been forwarding to the feds financial information of citizens that could not legally trigger an investigation in any case.

DeLay in his letter to O'Neill says the OECD's and EU's proposed "assaults on privacy and due process legal protection are driven by a desire to thwart international tax competition."

"So far, O'Neill has not calmed the fears of [those Americans] who are concerned that this potential [privacy invasion] could become a reality," says Dean.

It is hoped DeLay's letter will serve as a nudge in a positive direction.

No sooner was the ink dry on the Texas Republican's letter before the House Financial Services Committee approved legislative provisions to protect the privacy and security concerns of bank customers.

The committee voted Wednesday to pass H.R. 1408 – the Financial Antifraud Network, which directs regulators to create an antifraud system to combat fraud in the financial services industry.

The bill was improved by the addition of stronger safeguards to protect the civil liberties of financial services customers.

J. Bradley Jansen, deputy director for technology policy of Free Congress, singled out Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Mike Oxley, R-Ohio, for working to add privacy protections limiting the data-sharing. The new legislation does not permit relying on unconfirmed or "unadjudicated" information. Misuse of the information would draw a penalty.

Jansen said Rogers and Oxley should take their experience as former FBI agents "and turn their attention to the information-sharing boondoggle being promoted" by the OECD.

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