You are certainly correct in noting that a significant technique used by money launderers and terrorist financiers is to take advantage of the scope to very rapidly move money around the world electronically. They use this to disguise the source of the funds and to move the funds in such a way that it makes it very difficult to track them, thus making our job rather challenging.
We do have an advantage in Canada. Under our law, reporting entities are required to report electronic funds transfers of $10,000 or more if they are of an international nature. If the transfer is made from Canada to abroad or into Canada, then that is reported to us. That represents a very significant reporting stream. In fact, in 2005-06 about eight million of these reports were received by FINTRAC.
That also explains why information technology, for example, is a big part of our work. Information technology, along with the increasing experience of our analysts, is able to comb through these various transactions and establish linkages, identify patterns, and help to build cases. We take that information, along with our other reporting streams—suspicious transactions and large cash amounts—as well as information we might be getting from law enforcement via voluntary information on targets of interest to them. This also includes media reports and other publicly available information. We combine all of these to build our case, reach our legal threshold for disclosure, and disclose that information to law enforcement and CSIS for further investigation.