The U.S. Department of the Treasury imposed more than $1.21 billion in penalties on Bank of America for anti-money laundering and sanctions violations. The actions include the third-largest penalty in Treasury history and the largest in OCC history.
- FinCEN assessed a $1.2 billion penalty for failure to mitigate and report priority national security risks, including Chinese Money Laundering Networks and illicit finance along the southwest border.
- The OCC assessed a $750 million civil money penalty for a deficient and ineffective BSA/AML compliance program.
- OFAC announced an $11.6 million settlement for 475 apparent violations of sanctions programs targeting Iran, Russia, Belarus, Burma, Somalia, narcotics and global terrorism.
Bank of America admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act. It failed to timely report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions to FinCEN, including over $1 billion involving national security-related and other priority illicit finance risks, such as suspicious transactions indicative of Chinese Money Laundering Networks, fraud and potential trade-based money laundering connected to the southwest border.
The OCC found that the bank’s transaction monitoring system failed to properly monitor trillions of dollars in transactions, resulting in numerous late suspicious activity reports involving billions of dollars. The agency also found that significant compliance failures continued more than a year after a December 2024 cease-and-desist order, including failures to escalate potentially suspicious activity for investigation.
The FinCEN consent order requires a third-party lookback to identify and report missed suspicious activity, plus independent reviews of the bank’s monitoring, customer due diligence, foreign correspondent account due diligence and data governance programs. The OFAC settlement also includes compliance commitments involving training, testing, audits and future cooperation.
Read the Treasury Dept. Press Release
