Treasury Secretary Scott Besson

If you engage in these businesses, you have an affirmative obligation to identify the counterparties. And an unawareness of who they are is not sufficient under the law.

Sure. So let me start with saying that one of the most important things the president did upon coming into office was to declare a number of the narco group's terrorist organizations. And what that does is it unleashes additional authorities at Treasury and for us to better target some of the financial activities that these cartels are engaging in.

It's one thing to have our partners at DHS work on stopping the flow of people and drugs, but we can also use our financial tools to go after the money. Because if the money is not flowing back south, then there's less of an incentive to bring the drugs and the guns and some of the illicit activity

up to the north and so we continue to identify the various smuggling rings that are coming in and since the president took office we've engaged in five different actions going after nine different entities for a total of 16 individuals and what that allows us to do is work with our partners to freeze some of their accounts and take away the money that is funding the these activities that are poisoning our kids

Right. So what we did is we said that if you're going to be moving money, then you have an obligation to fulfill certain requirements that you identify that you know who your customer is. And so there is a statute called the Bank Secrecy Act that requires that if you're going to facilitate money,

transfers of monetary sums that you need to know who the party is that is receiving this money, that is engaging in this transaction. And so what we did is our Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which is called FinCEN, they launched an investigation into how this money was flowing south of the border

And found that Brinks had facilitated some of these money transfers without knowing who the parties were that were participating in this transaction. And so we engaged in an enforcement action against them. And we, as you just said, fined them $37 million for not following the requirements that we have for engaging in these money transfers.

How are you disrupting their operations? So the most important thing that we can do from the Treasury side is stop or make a lot more expensive the flow of money. The president made very clear upon coming into office that we were going to take a different approach to the fentanyl poisoning of our kids.

And so it's not just that we have heightened our activities here at Treasury to apply sanctions to these groups, but the president imposed tariffs on the Mexican government and on products that are coming in from Mexico to elicit participation and cooperation from the Mexican government.

And so we are seeing the Mexican government willing to work with us to go after these financial networks that are enriching the cartels as they're engaging in this activity in ways that they previously hadn't. And so it is

monitoring the money flows, tracking it down, either putting a complete stop to it and seizing that money, or at the very least, making it a lot more expensive for them to move that money around and try to deter them from engaging in these kinds of actions.

I will tell you that there were about 15,000 probationary employees that we could have let go. We kept about 7,500, 8,500 because we viewed them as essential to the mission. And we will know once we get inside. But what I can tell you is that we are doing a big review. Right now is playoff season for us. April 15th is game day.

So I have three priorities for the IRS, collections, privacy, and customer service, and we'll see what level is needed to prioritize all those.

What it does not include is a military guarantee. But what it does include is an implicit guarantee that if the United States of America is heavily invested in the economic future, you know, I call it an economic security guarantee. The more assets that U.S. companies have on the ground, the bigger interest that the U.S.

has in the future of Ukrainian economy doing well, the more security it creates for the Ukrainian people and the higher the return for the U.S. taxpayer.