Bank of America Pays $1.8 Billion Fine for Lax Money-Laundering Oversight

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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe....