Jack Harrington Quoted in Jacksonville Business Journal on FinCEN Facing Legal Pushback from New Federal Rule

Bradley attorney Jack Harrington was quoted in the Jacksonville Business Journal on the recent lawsuit filed by Fidelity National Financial against the U.S. Treasury and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

Harrington, a partner and chair of the Financial Crime & Economic Sanctions team at Bradley, who is not involved with the federal suit, said no company should be holding its breath over whether an injunction will be filed and should prepare for the rule to take effect.

“There's a sort of tension between the enforcement of this rule and their deregulatory agenda on the one hand, and then their desire to really go full steam ahead in tackling cartels and illicit drug trafficking on the other,” Harrington said.

A small percentage of all-cash real estate transactions are potentially tied to criminal money laundering, Harrington said, and for the past 50 years a variety of regulations have passed to combat illicit activity.

“So in 1996 they basically issued a rule that said money remitters, so like your Western Union-type businesses in New York City, had to report remittances of cash transactions of $750 or more to Colombia,” Harrington said. “And if you think about what was going on at that time, obviously drug trafficking and Colombian cartels were a primary focus, so that's why they passed that.”

“FinCEN basically took the position ‘hey, we've been limiting this to 14 different states, different counties, different zip codes, we're just going to make it a nationwide rule and get rid of the geographic targeting order that we have to renew every six months,’” Harrington said.

But as Fidelity National claims in their lawsuit, enforcement of the rule would bring an extensive administrative and regulatory burden to the industry.

Harrington said he’s sympathetic to the Jacksonville insurance company’s position against the proposed policy.

“... I personally would like to see a rule that may be a little bit more narrowly tailored to enable the real estate industry to report on transactions based on different criteria that are deemed to be suspicious, have red flags, as opposed to everything under the sun,” he said.

Regardless, the veteran attorney said his firm is advising clients to prepare for identifying reportable transactions, collecting beneficial ownership information of people purchasing real estate and securing its information technology.

Though Fidelity National’s lawsuit is pending, and an immediate reversal of the FinCEN rule is uncertain, a carve out in the Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump v. Casa Inc. prohibiting nationwide injunctions may aid the insurance giant’s case, Harrington explained.

The legal argument at the core of the suit is based on the Administrative Procedures Act, claiming that FinCEN is exceeding the authority it was given by congress by initiating its new regulation.

“Interestingly, in the recent Supreme Court case on birthright citizenship, the one that decided last month that judges cannot issue nationwide injunctions of administration policies, one of the carve outs that the Supreme Court had was judges can still issue injunctions that are based on violations of the Administrative Procedures Act, which is really the core argument that FNF is making in their suit.”

The full article, “Attorney explains what's at play behind Jax insurance company suit against FinCEN,” was published by the Jacksonville Business Journal on July 16, 2025.