To embed, copy and paste the code into your website or blog: Fifty years after its birth, the Bank Secrecy Act — along with the long-forgotten role it played in breaking open the Watergate scandal — continues to have an increasing influence on the financial system. On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested while burglarizing the office of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C. The story of the ensuing Watergate scandal is well known. Careers were made. Careers were broken. Countless books and movies document its enormous impact on our political landscape. What’s lost to time, however, and perhaps realized by only a select few within the financial sector, is that the Watergate scandal marked a public debut of sorts of the laws commonly known as the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). And with that debut, the term “money laundering” came into common parlance.