According to David Marchant, who runs the maverick news service KYC News in Miami and is a founder of WorldCompliance, it's necessary not only to perform due diligence on clients, but on those who would provide you with Patriot Act compliance tools! Says Marchant: "One of the most widely used KYC due diligence databases is run by a con man who said just after 9/11, in interviews with journalists, that he had 15 of the 19 terrorists on the 9/11 planes in his database before the attacks. I read about this in an AP story and thought it sounded less than genuine. For one thing, the terrorists weren't widely known. Maybe one or two had overstayed their welcome in the U. S., but they weren't on any checklists. So I went into this person's database, looked up the terrorists' names, and found 18 entries had been made on 9/14, the same day their names were released by the U. S. government."

According to Marchant, the compliance system that misrepresented its early access to this information is widely used by financial institutions. It's rather ironic that these institutionswould want to use a system run by someone of questionable integrity. "This system appeals to banks that just want to pay lip service to compliance," says Marchant...

..But the problem goes even deeper, according to Marchant: "Many financial institutions don't want to do this due diligence. They're in the business of of making money, and they don't care how they do it. Due diligence costs money on two ends: they must incur the expense of a KYC process and, on the other end, they may be turning down clients, which also costs them money. So there's little incentive to be compliant."