US Mines Suspicious Banking Data to Target Overseas Bribery (2)

The Justice Department is eager to build bribery cases by using bank reports of suspicious transactions, a data set more difficult to mine than ones used to prosecute health care fraud or insider trading.

The challenge is that millions of Suspicious Activity Reports filed by financial institutions each year contain vast amounts of unstructured information that’s difficult to filter down to viable leads for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases, say attorneys who’ve enforced that statute.

Some lawyers see signs that data mining efforts by the DOJ’s criminal fraud section are yielding initial returns in overseas bribery matters, while others say ...