U.S Bank hit with $613 million AML fine

One of the United States largest banks agreed Thursday to pay federal regulators and authorities $613 million in a settlement for longstanding financial crime compliance deficiencies, including capping alerts on potential illicit activity and attempting to hide known weaknesses from examiners.
 
FinCEN Director, Kenneth Blanco said,
 
“The U.S. Bank chose to manipulate their software to cap the number of suspicious activity alerts rather than to increase capacity to comply with anti-money laundering laws,”
 
“The U.S. Bank’s own anti-money laundering staff warned against the risk of this alerts-capping strategy, but these warnings were ignored by management,”
 
“The U.S. Bank failed in its duty to protect our financial system against money laundering and provide law enforcement with valuable information.”
 
The bank had “institutionalized money laundering as a pillar of the bank’s business practices,” according to FinCEN in its notice of proposed rulemaking. The bank allowed employees to “orchestrate” money laundering schemes, including from high-risk regions, shell companies and involving corrupt politically-exposed persons (PEPs).
 
The bank’s lax policies made it “attractive to a range of illicit actors engaged in organized crime, weapons proliferation, corruption, and sanctions evasion,” involving regions including North Korea, Russia and Ukraine.