The second-largest US bank faces record penalties for failing to comply with sanctions and money laundering laws.<\/p>\n
Published On 14 Oct 202614 Oct 2026<\/p>\n
The US Treasury Department has imposed more than $1.21 billion in penalties against Bank of America, the second-largest bank in the US, for violating anti-money laundering and sanctions laws.<\/p>\n
The fines announced on Tuesday include the third-largest penalty in the department\u2019s history, the US Treasury said in a statement.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWhen a bank of this size fails to meet its anti-money laundering and sanctions obligations, the consequences extend far beyond its own walls, exposing the entire US financial system to significant illicit finance risks,\u201d US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.<\/p>\n
He added that these \u201cactions send a clear message that even the biggest financial institutions are not above the law\u201d.<\/p>\n
Enforcement actions<\/p>\n
According to the Treasury Department, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) assessed a $1.2 billion penalty over the bank\u2019s failure to mitigate and report \u201cpriority national security risks, including Chinese Money Laundering Networks and illicit finance along the southwest border\u201d.<\/p>\n
The failures identified by FinCEN involved deficiencies related to the bank\u2019s suspicious transaction identification and reporting and customer due diligence processes. According to the statement, \u201cthe Bank effectively outsourced to third parties a substantial portion of its proactive detection and reporting obligations\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cBank of America failed to timely report to FinCEN over $5 billion dollars in suspicious transactions\u201d, the Treasury said in the statement.<\/p>\n
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) assessed a $750 million fine, the largest in its history, for the bank\u2019s deficient and ineffective anti-money laundering compliance programme. FinCEN\u2019s $1.2 billion penalty includes credit for the OCC fine.<\/p>\n
The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) also announced an $11.6 million settlement agreement over apparent violations of numerous sanctions programmes, including on Iran, Russia, narcotics and global terrorism.<\/p>\n
Bank of America agreed to settle 475 apparent violations of multiple sanctions programmes, and the settlement includes \u201csignificant compliance commitments regarding training, testing and audit, and future communication and cooperation with OFAC\u201d.<\/p>\n
In the statement, the Treasury said the actions \u201cunderscore the importance of effectively complying\u201d with US anti-money laundering and sanctions requirements.<\/p>\n
In response, Bank of America said in a statement: \u201cFinancial crime compliance is serious, and we are responsible for getting it right.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have invested billions of dollars in technology and dedicated thousands of employees to combat financial crime, and our team is far along with and committed to completing the work required to address the issues raised by our regulators.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The second-largest US bank faces record penalties for failing to comply with sanctions and money laundering laws. Published…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":932531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4498,45,49,48,44,995,772],"class_list":["post-932530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-banks","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-news","tag-regulation","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=932530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/932531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=932530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=932530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=932530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}