Perhaps I could just talk generally about the role that FINTRAC plays.
As you are probably somewhat aware, we receive reports from financial institutions and intermediaries about large cash transactions, so reports on any cash transaction over $10,000, any international electronic wire transfer over $10,000, as well as reports on suspicious transactions from a wide variety of reporting entities, as we call them, including banks, credit unions, accountants, money services businesses, securities dealers, and the like. We take all of that information, and we have sophisticated systems that allow us to sort and analyze it. We look for patterns of money laundering or terrorist financing. We also look at the information that is provided to us by law enforcement to see if we have information that would help them with their cases.
When I talk about information, FINTRAC takes a lot of time to verify that we are looking at one and the same individual, so that if you are looking at Janet DiFrancesco as a subject of investigation that in fact all of the transactions we're looking at are in fact for the same Janet DiFrancesco. We try to identify new account numbers, new entities that might be associated either through publicly available information, or through information that's available in our database, and we try to expand that network. What we're trying to show law enforcement is a picture that says your target might be Janet DiFrancesco, but we've been able to relate these six other individuals, these other entities, these account numbers at these financial institutions, and you might want to do some more work to see if that leads you where you're going in your investigation.
We hear from law enforcement that this is extremely helpful. It provides them new investigative leads. It provides them potentially new names of targets. It provides them an understanding of how targets are linked in terms of how the money is flowing. It often provides them with information about where money is potentially flowing out of the country. One of the real advantages that FINTRAC has over some of its international partners is that we get international wire transfers. So it also allows us to point them to accounts, or individuals, or entities in other countries that might be involved in facilitating the movement of funds.
Does that help?