34 U.S.C. § 20101 — Crime Victims Fund

(a) Establishment — This section creates a separate account in the Treasury called the Crime Victims Fund. (b) Fines deposited in Fund; penalties; forfeited appearance bonds — Except as limited by (c), the Fund gets: (1) nearly all fines collected from people convicted of federal crimes, except fines that other laws send elsewhere — like fines the Treasury Secretary can use under the Endangered Species Act or the Lacey Act, or fines that go to the railroad unemployment insurance account, the Postal Service Fund, the navigable waters revolving fund, or county public school funds; (2) penalty assessments collected under a separate federal criminal law; (3) proceeds from forfeited appearance bonds, bail bonds, and collateral; (4) money a court orders paid into the Fund as part of a federal criminal case; (5) gifts, bequests, or donations from private givers, which the Director can accept unless they come with conditions that conflict with applicable law, or that would require spending money the Office for Victims of Crime doesn't have; and (6) money from deferred-prosecution or non-prosecution agreements that would otherwise go into the Treasury's general fund. (c) Retention of sums in Fund; availability for expenditure without fiscal year limitation — Money deposited in the Fund stays there and can be spent on grants under this law without a yearly deadline. Even money Congress doesn't specifically authorize for spending the following year stays in the Fund for future years. (d) Availability for judicial branch administrative costs; grant program percentages — The Fund is divided as follows: (1) Repealed. (2) The first $10,000,000 deposited each year goes to grants under section 20104 — except that in a year when total Fund deposits exceed the fiscal year 1998 amount, that $10,000,000 grows by 50 percent of the increase over 1998, up to a cap of $20,000,000 total. (3) After that, whatever remains is available only for: (i) helping U.S. Attorneys' Offices and the FBI provide and improve victim services in the federal criminal justice system, through victim coordinators, specialists, and advocates, including their administrative support; and (ii) a Victim Notification System — this money can't be used for anything else. (4) Of what's left after that: 47.5 percent goes to grants under section 20102; 47.5 percent goes to grants under section 20103(a); and 5 percent goes to grants under section 20103(c). (5) On top of that, the Director can set aside up to $50,000,000 from money the Fund received in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, as an antiterrorism emergency reserve, and can refill it later by setting aside up to 5 percent of what's left each year after the above distributions, as long as the reserve never exceeds $50,000,000. That reserve pays for supplemental grants under section 20105 and compensation for victims of international terrorism under section 20106, and reserve money can carry over between fiscal years without the Fund's usual spending deadlines. (6) The Director can also set aside up to $10,000,000 in a Child Pornography Victims Reserve, for payments the Attorney General makes under a separate criminal law, and that reserve can likewise carry over between years, capped at $10,000,000 total. (e) Amounts awarded and unspent — If a grant recipient hasn't spent its whole grant by the end of the fiscal year it was awarded, it gets 3 more fiscal years to spend it on the same purpose. After that, unspent money normally goes to the antiterrorism emergency reserve, though the Attorney General can grant renewals or extensions; any remaining unspent money returns to the Fund. (f) "Offenses against the United States" as excluding — For this section, "offenses against the United States" does not include: (1) crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice; (2) offenses against District of Columbia law; or (3) offenses tried in an Indian tribal court or Court of Indian Offenses. (g) Grants for Indian tribes; child abuse cases — (1) The Attorney General must use 15 percent of the money available under (d)(2) for grants helping Native American tribes improve how they handle child-abuse cases, especially child sexual abuse, and improve investigation and prosecution of those cases. (2) The Attorney General may also use 5 percent of that same (d)(2) money, before it's otherwise distributed, for grants helping Indian tribes set up child-victim assistance programs. (3) "Tribe," for this subsection, has the meaning given in a separate section of title 25.