Exactly why is Bank of America Asking Customers About Their Citizenship?

Lenders discriminate against immigrants—and usually, it is completely appropriate.

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The reports began trickling in to online discussion boards and regional news, beginning in 2017. The stories all followed roughly the same pattern: Bank of America sent a customer a notice demanding details about their citizenship—and if they refused to answer, their accounts were promptly frozen from Reddit to The Kansas City Star, Washington to New York.

This tale had been produced with help through the Economic Hardship Reporting venture.

Bank of America explained it was necessary to ask the relevant concern to adhere to Treasury regulations. It is true that US finance institutions must monitor their makes up about signs and symptoms of cash laundering, and adhere to any office of Foreign Assets Control’s financial sanctions on a few nations, including Iran, Cuba, and Syria. Under a split legislation, international banking institutions must gather citizenship information from Us americans, fundamentally in order to find prospective tax-dodgers.

But domestically, they may not be needed to gather client citizenship information. In reality, Social protection figures aren’t also expected to start a merchant account. Soon after Donald Trump’s election, in December 2016, a senior counsel for the United states Bankers Association said that “banks don’t track whether or perhaps not somebody is lawfully within the U.S. ”

Paulina Gonzalez, executive manager of this economic addition nonprofit California Reinvestment Coalition, implies that Bank of America’s policy “raises questions regarding the part banking institutions will play in Trump’s America.

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