Davidson, Warren: The Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions will come to order. Without objection, the Chairman is authorized to declare a recess of the Committee at any time. This hearing is titled, Modernizing the Bank Secrecy Act Without objection, all members will have five legislative days within which to submit extraneous materials to the chairman for inclusion in the record. I now recognize myself for four minutes for an opening statement. I want to welcome our witnesses. Thank you for participating in our hearing today and for your work in preparation for it. This hearing is the subcommittee's third hearing of the 119th Congress on Anti-Money Laundering. Last spring, we examined the tools and techniques to combat fraud, and in the fall, we heard from FinCEN Director, Andrea Gackey. Today, we examine the Bank Secrecy Act itself and how to modernize its architecture for today's AML threat. The Bank Secrecy Act was enacted in 1970 to target the abuse of our financial system by organized crime. Over the decades, it has become a large, bloated surveillance machine demanding endless reports without delivering proportional results. Every year, financial institutions file nearly 5 million suspicious activity reports, or SARs, and over 21 million currency transaction reports, CTRs, with FinCEN. That's an average of 13,000 SARs and 59,000 CTRs every day. The SAR is typically filed when a financial institution has a transaction that involves or aggregates 5,000 or more, and a CTR is filed on cash transactions involving more than $10,000. These reporting thresholds have never been adjusted for inflation, and, you know, go back to the 1970s, $10,000 in 1970 is more than $80,000 today. Most CTRs aren't even looked at. According to a December 2024 GAO report, law enforcement agencies accessed only 5.4% of the CTRs filed between 2014 and 2023, so 10 years of data, only 5.4% even got looked at. Meanwhile, the Bank Secrecy Act enforcement drives financial institutions to file copious amounts of defensive SARs that not only provide no meaningful law enforcement purpose, they increase the noise and make the signal harder to find. It's not only CTRs and SARs, however. Under the Biden administration, the Corporate Transparency Act would have compelled 30 million small businesses to file beneficial ownership information with FinCEN. I'm thankful the Trump administration has rolled this back to focus on foreign ownership and not, you know, home ownership associations. So all this is unused reporting amounts to a reflexive desire to grow the BSA haystack rather than define the money laundering needle. So I was pleased to see FinCEN release its AML program notice of proposed rulemaking in April. While it is disappointing that the NPR does not address CTRs and SAR thresholds, it is a welcome shift away from the check-the-box defensive compliance, and it hopes to recenter AML on true risk. Furthermore, its move to increase FinCEN control over enforcement actions and raise the threshold for enforcement should help financial institutions trust that good faith, risk-based compliance and actionable intelligence will now be rewarded over a focus on volume and paperwork. As we approach, as we focus on risk, it was also ensured that the tools like artificial intelligence are fully deployed to counter AI-enabled crimes of today and in changes in cybersecurity. A wait-and-see approach that distrusts rapidly maturing AI systems will tie financial institutions' hands behind their back, letting, you know, bad actors continue to move money at the speed of the internet while law enforcement's stuck in the 70s. If we truly want to stop money laundering by criminals, scammers and terrorists of this It's time that we change course. Increased reporting thresholds, AI and a commitment to prioritizing risk give us the tools to do so. Put simply, we can continue to pile up reports on lawful activity, or we can focus on crime and actionable intelligence. It's time we make the change. I now recognize the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee, Ms. Beatty, for four minutes for an opening statement.