OTTAWA - Canada's terrorist financing sleuths say they're not sure how useful their work is to police and security officers in tracking down and prosecuting suspects, despite six years on the job.
Fintrac, the federal agency that monitors suspicious financial transactions, gets no automatic feedback on cases from the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Fintrac official Janet DiFrancesco told the Air India inquiry on Tuesday.
That means that Fintrac analysts don't always know whether the intelligence they hand over is actually leading to criminal charges or the dismantling of terrorist cells.
"Certainly it would be of interest for us to know,'' DiFrancesco told the inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major.
"You can't say that we can't do our job without knowing it (but) it's always sort of nice to know what the downstream impacts of your efforts are. Sometimes this information is made available to us, but I wouldn't say that we get it on any kind of systematic basis.''
The comments led Major to wonder how Fintrac can be sure it's doing its job properly -- and correcting any mistakes made along the way -- in the absence of consistent feedback from its anti-terrorist partners.
"I don't understand that there's not a free flow of information back and forth,'' said the retired judge.
Mark Potter, the Fintrac official in charge of relations with other agencies, said his organization does distribute questionnaires asking recipients to check off boxes indicating what use they made of various intelligence tips.
After a quick look at the form, however, Major likened the paperwork to bureaucratic "barbed wire'' and suggested there ought to be an easier way to do things.
Fintrac, short for Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, was set up in 2001 to monitor terrorist financing, as well as money laundering by criminal organizations such as drug-trafficking rings.
The agency has no enforcement power and simply passes its research to the RCMP, CSIS and other agencies that play a front-line role in fighting terrorism.
There have been recurring complaints -- most notably in a critical report by Auditor General Sheila Fraser in 2004 -- of bureaucratic bottlenecks and failures of communication among the ostensible partners.
Potter said the questionnaires sent to the Mounties, CSIS and others were a "first step'' in response to Fraser's criticism, although he acknowledged that answers to the questions are voluntary and not mandatory.
There's also an impression from periodic inter-agency meetings, he said, that Fintrac's work is better used and better appreciated than it used to be.
"Initially we were the new kid on the block,'' said Potter. "There was a period there in which we had to build those relationships with our partners . . . . I think we've come a long way.''
He admitted, however, that more work is needed and noted that ultimately the underlying issue is the one posed by Fraser -- whether Fintrac is providing value for money.
The agency, which has an annual budget in excess of $30 million, reported last year that in the previous 12 months it had identified $250 million in financial transactions that could have terrorist links.
But Supt. Rick Reynolds, the head of the RCMP's terrorist financing unit, testified earlier this week that he didn't know how the agency came up with that figure. The experience of the Mounties, said Reynolds, is that the dollar figures involved aren't that big.
The RCMP has laid only two terrorist financing charges in the last six years and has yet to obtain a conviction.
Fintrac officials, for their part, say they flag everything that looks suspicious to them, but that doesn't mean hard evidence of terrorist links will be found upon further investigation.
The inquiry headed by Major has no mandate to trace the money trail of the Sikh separatists blamed for the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182 with the loss of 329 lives. Rather, it's examining current enforcement efforts to see if reforms are needed to avert future tragedies.
