The US Treasury has imposed more than $1.2 billion in penalties on Bank of America for failures in its anti-money laundering and sanctions controls. It is the third-largest penalty in Treasury history.
Three agencies acted together on Tuesday. FinCEN assessed $1.2 billion for the bank’s failure to mitigate and report priority national security risks, including Chinese money laundering networks and illicit finance along the US southwest border. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency imposed a $750 million civil money penalty, the largest in its history, which FinCEN credits toward its own total. OFAC separately announced an $11.6 million settlement over apparent violations of sanctions programmes covering Iran, Russia, narcotics and global terrorism.
As part of the FinCEN resolution, Bank of America admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act. It failed to maintain an AML programme that met the law’s minimum requirements, did not carry out due diligence on correspondent accounts for foreign financial institutions and did not file required suspicious activity reports. Treasury said the settlement reflects no reduction to the base penalty, including no credit for remediation or cooperation.
The OCC said the bank’s compliance programme still shows widespread breakdowns in internal controls. “The bank’s poor response to its BSA deficiencies is unacceptable,” said Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould. The OCC penalty will be paid to the US Treasury, and FinCEN is also requiring remedial action from the bank.
Herald View
Read past the headline number to the word zero. That is how much credit Treasury gave Bank of America for cooperating or fixing things, and it is the real signal here. The 2024 TD Bank case showed regulators will go big on AML failures. This one shows size and systemic importance buy no leniency either. For every large US lender, the lesson lands in the compliance budget, not the press office.
