Bank of America has been fined $1.2bn (\u00a3910m) for failing to detect potential money laundering and other illegal activity, the US Treasury Department said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The banking giant failed to report over $5bn in suspicious activity to the government, $1bn of which posed national security and illicit finance risks, the Treasury said. <\/p>\n
Those failures included not flagging transactions that possibly involved Chinese money laundering networks or trade-based laundering “with a substantial nexus to the southwest border”, according to the Treasury.<\/p>\n
“Our team is far along with and committed to completing the work required to address the issues raised by our regulators,” Bank of America told the BBC.<\/p>\n
The announcement came less 24 hours before Bank of America was due to announce its quarterly earnings on Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n
“Our third-quarter results will include a non-tax-deductible charge of $1.2 billion impacting net income by approximately 17 cents per share,” the bank said in an emailed statement.<\/p>\n
“We have already dedicated substantial personnel and resources to our ongoing remediation efforts, and those costs are in the current expense base,” it added.<\/p>\n
In announcing the fine, the third-largest the department has ever imposed, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said: “When 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.”<\/p>\n
The Treasury said the bank overly relied on inquiries from outside parties like law enforcement and other financial institutions instead of its own internal controls.<\/p>\n
This meant that it “effectively outsourced to third parties a substantial portion of its proactive detection and reporting obligations,” the department said.<\/p>\n
As part of the settlement, Bank of America admitted that it “willfully violated” the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain a compliant anti-money laundering programme, conduct required due diligence on foreign correspondent accounts and file suspicious activity reports, the Treasury said.<\/p>\n
The $1.2bn fine included penalties imposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).<\/p>\n
The OCC’s $750m fine marked the biggest penalty it has ever levied.<\/p>\n
OFAC said its settlement with the bank was tied to 475 apparent violations of sanctions programmes including those on Russia and Iran, narcotics, and global terrorism.<\/p>\n
The settlement amount of $11.6m reflected the determination that Bank of America’s apparent violations were “non-egregious”, OFAC said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bank of America has been fined $1.2bn (\u00a3910m) for failing to detect potential money laundering and other illegal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":802050,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-802049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/802050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}