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The housing industry and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) have been bickering for years over reporting requirements for all-cash residential real estate transactions. Fidelity National Financial (FNF) appears to have finally had enough.
FNF and its subsidiary Fidelity National Title Insurance Co. filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Jacksonville against the Department of the Treasury and its secretary, Scott Bessent, as well as FinCEN and its director, Andrea Gacki.
The suit challenges the Anti-Money Laundering Regulations for Residential Real Estate Transfers rule, which was promulgated under the Biden administration and goes into effect in December 2025.
The rule requires title firms to report specific details on all-cash home purchase transactions. These include the names, addresses, dates of birth, citizenship status and ID numbers of all people involved — including minors, payment details and information about trusts and entities that are purchasing the property.
FNF feels the rule is “arbitrary and capricious.”
According to the complaint, the rule increases the annual volume of disclosure reports by 4,000%. This in turn creates “massive costs and intrusions on privacy without any remotely commensurate benefit to FinCEN’s stated goal of identifying money laundering transactions.”
FinCEN has estimated that the rule will require approximately 800,000 to 850,000 reports per year. The total costs are estimated at $428.4 million to $690.4 million in the first year, and between $401.2 million to $663.2 million annually thereafter. FNF estimates that this will add anywhere from $472 to $829 to all covered residential home sales.
“Those staggering figures do not even include many of the costs that entities like Plaintiffs will incur to establish and operate new IT systems and train personnel to implement the Rule,” the complaint states.
FNF argues that through the rule, FinCEN is overstepping its legal authority since it requires title firms to report all relevant transactions and not just ones that are suspicious.
“The statutory authority on which FinCEN relied under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), authorizes FinCEN to impose reporting obligations only as to ‘suspicious transactions relevant to a possible violation of law or regulation,’” the complaint states. “The Rule on its face exceeds that restriction, because it eliminates any requirement of specific indicia of suspicious activity.”
The complaint acknowledges that FinCEN has for years operated a reporting program for similar transactions in key markets via its Geographic Targeting Orders. It also argues that FinCEN has “failed to cite any data from that program justifying a nationwide rule indiscriminately demanding reporting on all transactions.”
“The mere fact that a type of transaction ‘can be’ used by ‘illicit actors’ does not render the entire category of transactions suspicious,” the complaint states.
In addition, FNF claims that the rule violates its Fourth and First Amendment rights. It alleges that collecting detailed personal information without suspicion or a warrant amounts to an unconstitutional search, and that requiring companies to collect and report this information against their will violates free speech rights.
FNF also alleges that the rule violates the Constitution’s Commerce Clause and nondelegation doctrine as it tries to regulate local real estate transactions, not interstate transactions, which the Treasury does not have the power to impose under its mandate from Congress.
FNF is asking the court to declare the rule unlawful and permanently block it from taking effect.
In an August 2024 blog post about the promulgation of the rule, the American Land Title Association (ALTA) noted that FinCEN “incorporated several important industry recommendations to streamline the regulation and reduce some of the burden on real estate professionals.”
FinCEN, FNF and ALTA did not return HousingWire‘s requests for comment.
