Breaking news! FINCEN rehashes same old North Korea advisory.

To hear Yonhap tell it, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network just stuffed Kim Jong Un into a size XXXXL iron maiden, financially speaking:

The United States has issued another advisory on financial transactions with North Korea, designating the communist country as a jurisdiction with high money laundering and terrorist financing risks, a U.S. report said Wednesday.

The guidance to U.S. financial institutions, issued Monday by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), is based on the international money laundering watchdog Financial Action Task Force’s updated list of countries with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing deficiencies, according to the Radio Free Asia (RFA) report. [Yonhap]

The truth is much less dramatic. In reality, FINCEN didn’t “designate” North Korea as anything. It’s just echoing the latest iteration of the same call for “countermeasures” against North Korean money laundering that the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has been issuing since 2011. If you actually read FINCEN’s advisory, there’s a section called “Summary of Changes to this List,” which shows that the advisory language applicable to North Korea didn’t change at all.

Jurisdictions in this section (Iran and DPRK) are subject to the FATF’s call on its members and other countries to apply countermeasures to protect the international financial system from AML/CFT risks. U.S. financial institutions should continue to consult existing FinCEN and U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) guidance on engaging in financial transactions with Iran and DPRK. Previous FinCEN advisories and guidance on Iran and DPRK remain in effect. [….]

Existing U.S. sanctions – in particular, those under the North Korea Sanctions Regulations and Executive Orders 13570 and 13551 – create a legal framework that limits U.S. financial institutions’ direct exposure to the types of North Korean financial or commercial transactions contributing to DPRK’s proliferation activities that are the focus of UNSCRs 2087 and 2094, as well as UNSCR 1718. [FINCEN]

Warnings like these may well dissuade the more reputation-conscious banks from handling transactions with North Korea or encourage them to report the suspicious ones, but this advisory doesn’t block anything, and strictly speaking, isn’t even a sanction. It’s the banking equivalent of, “Hey, kid, be careful, broken glass.”

In fairness, I vaguely recall that I made the same mistake myself several years ago, when I knew much less about this subject. There isn’t really much of a story here at all.

For those interested in what our North Korea sanctions actually do — and don’t do — the only primer I’m aware of is the one I wrote for the Fletcher Security Review.