Treasury seeks brainy search engine to help follow terrorist money

The Treasury Department is searching for a supersmart search engine to spot signs of terrorist-financing and money laundering among monetary transactions totaling 9 terabytes of data -- the equivalent of a stack of typewritten pages nearly 460 miles high.

Treasury's intelligence arm, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, has a database to organize the 15 million reports it receives from financial institutions annually, but needs a better way to home in on what's in there, FinCEN officials said Monday. On June 17, FinCEN issued a request for information from contractors on technology to improve analytical queries into the repository.

The software must be able to work with FinCEN's existing fraud-detection application to probe the database, according to the notice.

Ray Bjorklund, chief knowledge officer at market research firm FedSources, said the cost of such technology could range from $20,000 to $2 million, depending on the pattern-matching features FinCEN wants and can afford.

"You need to be able to quickly pull pieces from many different sources," he said. "The ability to get to all of the relevant tables that are within that database and extract what they need, when they need it and be able to correlate four or five different pieces of information -- therein lies the trick."

Deploying the tool also will be a challenge, he said. "This is not something that can easily be shared in a networked environment" such as an online cloud that provides services remotely, Bjorklund said. "It is very tough to get these systems to tune to the database that that you have."

Complicating matters, he said, is the fact that FinCEN expects to switch databases in early fiscal 2012, as noted in the RFI. The agency needs an application that can work with its current Sybase database and then adapt to an Oracle framework it plans to install.

The market survey requires vendors to include prices and delivery schedules in their responses, along with a description of their technology's specifications, by July 5. FinCEN does not plan to pay for this information or commit to awarding a contract, according to the RFI. "Dependent upon the results of this market survey, FinCEN may subsequently issue a request for quotation (RFQ) to acquire the appropriate solution," states the notice.

There is no date set for issuing an RFQ yet, FinCEN spokesman Stephen Hudak said Monday. He said he could not expand on the details of the RFI because of contracting rules.

Potential bidders who are concerned about disclosing business-sensitive information in their responses can note their models contain proprietary information. But, "If Treasury intends to take some of the clever ideas that come forward in the RFI and put them in the [request for proposals,] that may compromise the prospective offerors' business," Bjorklund noted.

Hudak said the agency asked for precise information because "we're on tight timelines and tight budgets." The potential enhancement is part of a four-year agencywide technology upgrade that is half complete, he said. "We're trying to find out what the best technology is," Hudak added.

Legislation passed after the Sept. 11 attacks expanded the jurisdiction of the 20-year-old agency. To find possible terrorist backers, the agency now collects records of large-transactions from hundreds of thousands of financial institutions, including banks, stock brokers, insurers, check cashing services, currency exchanges, casinos and gem dealers.

The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act and post-Sept. 11 amendments require these entities to keep records of cash transactions exceeding $10,000 and to report abnormal dealings.

"FinCEN has a huge amount of data that it gathers in suspicious activity reports and it needs to be able to manipulate that data and provide it to law enforcement," said Ernest Patrikis, an attorney with the bank and insurance regulatory practice at law firm White & Case and a 30-year veteran of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. "The worst thing in the world for FinCEN would be to have that data and not be able to use it. This requires up-to-date systems."