FinCEN assessed a $1.2 billion penalty against Bank of America on October 13. The agency says the bank admitted willful Bank Secrecy Act violations involving its anti-money-laundering program, foreign-correspondent due diligence and suspicious-activity reporting. The Associated Press independently reports the resolution.
Treasury describes a control failure, not merely missing paperwork: the bank relied substantially on outside inquiries to identify potentially suspicious activity, while alerts accumulated without timely investigation. Treasury says more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions were not reported promptly. Suspicious is a reporting category here, not proof that every transaction involved a crime.
The resolution requires a third-party lookback and independent reviews of monitoring, customer due diligence, correspondent-account controls and relevant data governance. Separately, OFAC announced an $11,662,930 settlement for apparent sanctions violations. This dispatch keeps the agencies’ findings and settlement language attached to their sources.
The bank told AP that it had invested billions in technology and assigned thousands of employees to financial-crime work, and remained committed to completing remediation. Those are the bank’s statements, not independently established evidence that the deficiencies are repaired. The practical question is whether alerts now reach competent investigation and timely reporting.
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