House Committee on Financial Services Republicans express opposition to bank gun sales tracking proposal

House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services Republicans recently expressed opposition to Amalgamated Bank’s proposal to track citizens who purchase firearms.

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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.