TI director: U.S. must reckon with role as corruption facilitator

The United States is one of few leaders in the anti-corruption enforcement space but still must reckon with its role as a top facilitator of financial crime, according to the executive director at the U.S. office of anti-corruption organization Transparency International.

Gary Kalman said during his keynote address at Compliance Week’s Third-Party Risk Management Summit in Atlanta that the United States “must have some ownership of our role in facilitating global corruption.” He cited Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who has acknowledged in public speeches “there’s a good argument that, right now, the best place to hide and launder ill-gotten gains is actually the United States.”

“She didn’t mean that we’re doing a bad job, but that there are gaps in our regulatory system that make it very hard for those of us trying to fight illicit finance to actually do our jobs,” said Kalman.