Treasury turns bank compliance officers into paid informants.

The US Treasury is launching a whistleblower program that pays informants a cut of penalties recovered when they report violations of anti-money-laundering laws. This means bank employees, compliance officers, and other insiders now have a direct financial incentive to report their employers' violations to the government instead of staying silent.

For decades, money laundering enforcement relied on external audits, regulatory inspections, and occasional tips from competitors or law enforcement. This program flips the incentive: it turns the people closest to the violations—the ones who see them daily and have the most to lose by reporting—into paid informants. The mechanism is simple but structural: if you work at a bank and you know it's moving dirty money, you can now report it and collect a percentage of the penalty. That changes the internal calculus for compliance officers and back-office staff who previously had only reputational or legal risk for staying quiet. The program mirrors the SEC's securities whistleblower program, which has paid out over $1.5 billion since 2011 and generated thousands of tips that led to enforcement actions the agency would not have discovered on its own.