Your tax dollars at work: GAO on embargo enforcement

Responding to a Congressional request, the Government Accountability Office has done another report on Cuba embargo enforcement, focusing on U.S. agencies’ allocation of resources.

The full report (pdf) is here; the New York Times coverage is here.

The report finds an emphasis on Cuba enforcement that, in an environment of finite resources, has a cost:

“DHS’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP)…has increased intensive, “secondary” inspections of passengers arriving from Cuba at the Miami airport; in 2007, CBP conducted these inspections for 20 percent of arrivals from Cuba versus an average of 3 percent of other international arrivals. CBP data and interviews with agency officials suggest that the secondary inspections of Cuba arrivals at the airport may strain CBP’s ability to carry out its mission of keeping terrorists, criminals, and other inadmissible aliens from entering the country. Moreover, recent GAO reports have found weaknesses in CBP’s inspections capacity at key U.S. ports of entry nationwide.”

When it comes to Treasury enforcement of embargo violations, GAO found the following:

“Although the Cuba embargo is one of more than 20 sanctions programs that OFAC administers, OFAC penalties for Cuba embargo violations represented more than 70 percent of its total penalties in 2000-2005, falling to 29 percent in 2006.”

Also:

“Our analysis of OFAC data shows that from 2000 through 2006, the agency collected fines totaling about $8.1 million for 8,170 violations of the Cuba embargo—an average of $992 per violation. Most of these violations were relatively minor, such as purchasing Cuban cigars on the Internet. Over the same period, OFAC imposed fines totaling about $12.4 million for 3,054 violations of other sanctions programs, such as those on Iran, North Korean, and Syria—an average of about $4,071 per violation.”

U.S. officials interviewed by GAO also complained that embargo enforcement is difficult. One reason is that foreign governments, if you can believe it, sometimes decline the opportunity to act as chivatos for U.S. law enforcement by refusing to snitch on U.S. travelers to Cuba who pass through their territory:

“The unilateral nature of the embargo and a lack of multilateral cooperation hamper U.S. agencies’ diplomatic and enforcement efforts, according to agency officials. For example, some governments have actively opposed the U.S. embargo by refusing to identify U.S. travelers making unauthorized visits to Cuba via third countries, complicating agencies’ enforcement activities, or have declined to limit their trade, financial, and travel relations with Cuba, further undermining the embargo’s stated purpose.”

The feds also complain about other challenges that seem to be explained by Cuban Americans’ love for their own relatives in Cuba:

“Agency officials said that divided public opinion about the embargo has contributed to widespread, small-scale violations of restrictions on family travel and remittances and to an environment in which some individuals can profit from illegal activities… Also, financial services technologies, such as stored-value cards and online money transfer services, and widespread money laundering in southern Florida create opportunities for transferring funds to Cuba illegally.”

In the end, GAO could not determine how the Administration’s 2004 family sanctions and other tightened sanctions have affected Cuba’s economy:

“The impact of tighter restrictions implemented in 2004 and 2005 on travel, cash remittances, and gifts to Cuba cannot be determined because of an absence of reliable data.”