House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services Republicans recently expressed opposition to Amalgamated Bank’s proposal to track citizens who purchase firearms.
U.S. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), ranking member of the Committee on Financial Services, joined 22 colleagues in forwarding correspondence to Amalgamated Bank President and CEO Priscilla Sims Brown regarding the bank favoring the creation of a new firearms sellers specific Merchant Category Code (MCC) through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
“As you know, there is no fair or impartial way to determine from a transaction’s MCC whether a transaction is suspicious,” the legislators wrote to Brown. “The MCC indicates only that a purchase was made at a certain retailer; it does not provide data regarding what was purchased. There is a serious risk that this new MCC will be abused with every transaction flagged as suspicious.”
McHenry also sent a letter to Acting Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) Director Himamauli Das requesting information on how FinCEN would utilize new data from the firearm retailer MCC.
“At a minimum, monitoring the firearms seller MCC is an overt attempt to chill the exercise of constitutionally protected rights and poses a serious risk of circumventing important existing legal restrictions on the creation of a firearm registry,” the legislators concluded in correspondence to Brown.