Bank of America has been fined a total of $1.2 billion dollars by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) after admitting failures of its Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and anti-money laundering (AML) compliance program resulting in over $5 billion in suspicious activity.
The $750 million fine from the OCC is the largest civil money penalty that the bureau has ever issued.
FinCEN is responsible for the remainder of the fine and credits the $750 million against its total penalty of $1.2 billion.
The FinCEN order details how Bank of America “willfully failed to implement and maintain adequate internal controls for BSA compliance” which resulted in missing or delayed reports for “over $5 billion of suspicious activity, with roughly $1 billion of this activity implicating national security-related and other priority illicit finance risks, including suspicious transactions indicative of Chinese Money Laundering Networks.”
This Chinese Money Laundering Network activity included “high volumes of back-to-back credit card purchases at major retailers and shipping companies inconsistent with customer profiles,” and “regular, large-value ACH and bill pay transactions to pay off balances for credit cards issued by third-party financial institutions.
These included “cards in the name of third-party individuals for which there was no apparent commercial purpose; large wire transfers to counterparties in China with generic descriptions (e.g., “for goods”) and no discernible business rationale; and substantial, repeated transfers to counterparties with no web presence operating from residential addresses, demonstrating an apparent lack of legitimate commercial purpose.”
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