BofA fined $1.21B for failures it agreed to fix in 2024

(The Center Square) – Federal regulators fined Bank of America $1.21 billion Tuesday after finding it failed to quickly report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions and relied on others to catch what its own systems missed.

The $1.2 billion assessed by Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network includes a $750 million penalty from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the largest in the agency’s history, the OCC said. The penalty will be paid to the U.S. Treasury. The Office of Foreign Assets Control separately settled 475 apparent sanctions violations with the bank for $11.6 million.

Treasury didn’t immediately respond to questions from The Center Square on Tuesday afternoon.

OCC examiners reviewing a small sample of accounts in the bank’s $102 billion credit card portfolio found 10 showing signs of potential trade-based money laundering. At the agency’s request, Bank of America reviewed those accounts and filed suspicious activity reports covering hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions in five of them. Absent the OCC’s request, the order states, “there is no indication that the Bank would have reviewed these accounts or filed these SARs.”