Bank of America was ordered Tuesday to pay $1.2 billion to the Treasury Department, which said it violated anti-money laundering laws and sanctions.
This sanction is the third largest ever imposed in the history of the Treasury, the agency said. Of that sum, the bank was ordered to pay $750 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the largest fine ever imposed.
“Today’s actions send a clear message that even the largest financial institutions are not above the law,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
As the nation’s second-largest bank, Bank of America serves more than 70 million customers and processes approximately $4.5 trillion in payments for individual customers each year.
Additionally, the bank manages $450 trillion in payments for business customers, including payroll, corporate credit cards and vendor payments.
The Treasury Department said Bank of America “admits that it willfully violated” the Bank Secrecy Act and “failed to maintain” an anti-money laundering program that met the law’s minimum requirements. The bank also admitted to failing to file mandatory suspicious activity reports.
“Bank of America failed to timely report to FinCEN more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, more than $1 billion of which involved national security and other high-priority illicit financial risks, including suspicious transactions indicative of Chinese money laundering, fraud, and potential trade-based money laundering networks with a substantial nexus to the Southwest border,” the Treasury Department said in a statement.
FinCEN is the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which fights money laundering, illicit financial activities and terrorist financing networks around the world.
“Financial crime compliance is a serious issue and we have a responsibility to get it right,” Bank of America said in a statement to NBC News.
“We have invested billions of dollars in technology and dedicated thousands of employees to fighting financial crime, and our team is well advanced and committed to completing the work required to resolve the issues raised by our regulators.”
“We will continue to support federal and local law enforcement with thousands of investigations and report hundreds of thousands of suspicious activity reports each year. »
In addition to the FinCEN violations, the Treasury Department said Bank of America is also settling “its potential civil liability for 475 apparent violations of multiple sanctions programs” with the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees America’s sprawling sanctions.
The company “processed millions of dollars in payments in apparent violation of sanctions programs targeting Russia, Belarus, Iran, Burma, Somalia, narcotics and global terrorism,” the Treasury Department said.
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 U.S. financial system to significant illicit financing risks. »
Bank of America will report its third quarter results shortly before 7 a.m. ET on Wednesday.
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