Expanding Access to Financial Services

Over the last month, I have been looking into why CNMI residents continue to encounter problems opening brokerage accounts, obtaining credit cards, and accessing other financial services that are readily available elsewhere in the United States. One issue that keeps coming up is something very basic. We do not have standardized street addresses throughout much of the Commonwealth. I wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent asking for help determining whether federal customer identification requirements are contributing to these problems and, if so, how existing alternatives for communities without conventional street addresses can be applied to the CNMI. People living in the Northern Mariana Islands should not be shut out of financial services simply because our addressing system looks different. I am looking forward to Treasury's response and, hopefully, identifying a practical path forward.