Bank of America on Tuesday was fined $1.8 billion, a near-record, for overlooking money laundering and other suspicious customer payments that crisscrossed between the United States and countries such as Russia, Belarus and Mexico.
The illicit money was waved through even after securities regulators chided the bank two years ago over suspected money laundering and told it to be more vigilant.
Scores of transactions continued to cross easily as part of trillions of dollars of activity that the bank didn’t adequately monitor, the Treasury Department and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said in a joint statement announcing the fines.
Some of the transactions could be explained as “human error,” the Treasury Department said. Others demonstrated what regulators called systemic gaps in the bank’s compliance program, with Bank of America at times failing to make even cursory efforts to investigate suspicious activity.
Banks are required to file “suspicious activity reports” with the federal government when they believe transactions could be part of a money-laundering scheme, fraud or other illegal activity. Regulators said Bank of America had regularly avoided that, ignoring “large volumes of suspicious activity implicating national security-related risks,” including $600 million of transactions just involving salvaged vehicles.
It took Bank of America more than six months, in many instances, to file SARs — when it did so at all.
“Today’s actions send a clear message that even the biggest financial institutions are not above the law,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
Bank of America neither admitted nor denied the accusations. A spokeswoman, Christa Robinson, provided a statement that did not directly address the substance of the Treasury’s accusations but noted that the bank had worked with regulators to come to a resolution.
“We have invested billions of dollars in technology and dedicated thousands of employees to combat financial crime, and our team is far along with and committed to completing the work required to address the issues raised by our regulators,” Ms. Robinson said.
Bank of America is slated to report its quarterly earnings on Wednesday, and analysts expect that it earned about $8 billion in profit for the three-month period.
Last week, The New York Times published an analysis detailing how Russian companies evaded Western sanctions by funneling money through a Chinese bank with accounts at large Wall Street banks, including Bank of America.
The penalty on Tuesday was rare in both its size and its timing. Bank of America’s compliance with money-laundering laws was investigated under the Biden administration, but the Trump administration has taken a more relaxed approach to financial oversight. In recent weeks, however, regulators have been targeting banks on a range of issues.
Last week, the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined American Express $350 million for failing to properly monitor billions of dollars of suspicious transactions that regulators said had spanned a decade.
Separately, Trump housing regulators said last week that they were investigating Wells Fargo over whether its lending efforts to encourage Black homeownership constituted racial discrimination.
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