The Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday approved the Bassam Barabandi Rewards for Justice Act, a bill that would help dismantle foreign dictators’ efforts to evade U.S. sanctions.

The measure would establish a rewards program for people close to authoritarian regimes to provide the U.S. government with information about sanctions-evasion efforts. Dictators and their cronies often attempt to evade U.S. sanctions by renaming companies held in their names or putting assets in the name of other family members. The idea behind the measure is that lower-level officials and servants of those regimes would know where to direct U.S. officials, and that they may be more likely to do so if provided enough of a financial incentive.

There’s some reason to believe that such people could be turned against authoritarian regimes. The bill’s namesake, Bassam Barabandi, is a former Syrian diplomat who defected from the Assad regime while posted in Washington at the start of the Syrian civil war.

He then “lobbied the U.S. government with information on Syrian oligarchs close to Assad and their sanctions evasion practices,” according to Representative Joe Wilson, the bill’s author.

Barabandi told National Review last year: “You incentivize hundreds of people around the sanctioned people: their driver, their secretary, their personal assistant, their bank manager, their partners. There’s a lot of people around that circle, who are really poor people or they don’t have that good income.”

The House passed the bill last July, so if the Senate does the same, it will go to the president’s desk. Wilson said on Twitter yesterday that he hopes the Senate will act quickly.