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These costs might all be worth it if there were any proof that anti-money-laundering laws lowered crime rates. But the laws don't even put a dent in money laundering. A Brookings Institution scholar testified before Congress that 99.9% of dirty money in the United States is successfully laundered.

[From The $7 Billion Laundry Bill - Forbes.com]

Perhaps there has been some progress, because a more recent study in the UK suggested that some 0.75% of the dodgy cash is being intercepted now. But the general point holds. Our mental model is all wrong. We shouln't be trying (and failing at great expense) to keep dirty money out of the system, we should be getting it into the system and then using the modern technologies at our disposal - data analytics, forensics, machine learning and artificial intelligence - to work out who is up to no good so that law enforcement resources can be properly targeted.

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