Bank of America will pay $1.2bn after US regulators said it failed to detect and report potential money laundering, sanctions breaches and other illicit activity on a vast scale.
The Treasury Department said the bank did not report more than $5bn in suspicious activity, including about $1bn linked to national security and illicit finance risks. According to Treasury, the missed alerts included transactions that may have involved Chinese money laundering networks and trade-based laundering tied to the US southwest border.
This was not a dispute over paperwork. Treasury said Bank of America relied too heavily on prompts from law enforcement and other financial institutions instead of its own monitoring. In plain terms, the government says one of the country’s biggest banks waited to be nudged.
As part of the settlement, Treasury said the bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain a compliant anti-money laundering programme, carry out required due diligence on foreign correspondent accounts and file suspicious activity reports.
The penalty includes a $750m fine from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which Treasury said is the largest the OCC has imposed, and an $11.6m settlement with the Office of Foreign Assets Control over 475 apparent sanctions violations involving programmes covering Russia, Iran, narcotics and global terrorism. OFAC said it treated those sanctions breaches as non-egregious.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said failures at a bank of this size expose the wider financial system to illicit finance risks. That is the part worth keeping in focus. A penalty this large is not only a rebuke to one institution; it is a statement about supervisory patience running out.
Bank of America said it is well advanced in work required by regulators and has already committed substantial staff and resources to remediation. It also said the charge will reduce net income by about 17 cents per share.
Harvey Jr. 
Marcus Azzopardi 
Gabriel Fenech