Madam Speaker, the member made several important points.
When we look at the United States and the case of Mr. Madoff, Harry Markopolos found out about this Ponzi scheme 10 years ago and turned over all the information to the SEC. However, when he was asked how long it took him to find out about it, he said that he became immediately suspicious because Madoff never reported losing money in any month. He knew it was a fraud in about five minutes.
The fact is that the ability is there for people to pick up on these frauds at very early stages.
We just recently developed money laundering laws that require real estate and insurance people to report suspicious transactions. The key here is the banks. The commonality that these fraudsters use is the banking system. The banks are already required to report deposits over $10,000 in cash, but we should have stricter reporting requirements on the banks.
I liked his idea about forensic auditing, because that is part of it too, but the tools are all there right now. We just need to work together, rather than having a kind of hands-off disinterest in this problem. These people have been operating right under the noses of the banking system all these years.
The government needs to spend more time advertising the problem. It has millions and millions of dollars for feel-good advertising, for “the land is strong and vote Conservative” ads, but it should be running advertising campaigns on this very problem, on how to report and how to discover these sorts of fraudulent activities.
There are a lot of different areas that we should be looking at right now. The tools are out there. We just need to act on them.