The administration is preparing new limits on who may send money from the United States to other countries.
As reported by The Gateway Pundit, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News host Laura Ingraham this week that the administration is moving to stop migrants on government assistance from wiring money out of the country. The effort is part of a broader crackdown on suspected federal benefits fraud in Minnesota, including Internal Revenue Service audits of some banks suspected of money laundering.
Bessent has said he is concerned that remittances sent to Somalia from Minnesotas Somali community have reached al-Shabaab, the terrorist group that operates in East Africa. He has not publicly presented proof that the transfers now under review financed the group, and receiving public assistance does not, by itself, establish that a person committed fraud.
If you are wiring the money out of the country, one of two things must be true: youre either getting too much money and your benefits must be cut, or youre part of this conspiracy. Where did that money come from? Were gonna find out, Bessent said. Those were the secretarys own terms, and they were pointed.
From now on, anyone who wires money out from one of these money service businesses has to check a box saying whether they are on public assistance, he said. And if you are on public assistance, we are going to start pushing that you cannot wire money out of the country.
The secretarys wording describes a reporting requirement and a policy the department will start pushing, not a ban that is already in force. Treasury has not yet spelled out when a prohibition would take effect, which benefit programs would be covered, or what legal authority would be used to impose it.
The open questions are whether the checkbox rule and the promised bar on overseas transfers will be formalized. Another is how the department will separate lawful family remittances from the fraud and terrorism-finance risks Bessent says he intends to stop.
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