Financial crimes

A bipartisan group of senators Tuesday urged the Treasury Department and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to speed up implementation of the Corporate Transparency Act. It's only the latest of several efforts by lawmakers urging regulators to move faster since Fincen missed the statutory implementation deadline in January.

Angela Garcia, who was accused of embezzling $69,000 from the Georgia bank, has been banned from the banking industry.

The number of suspicious activity reports involving cryptocurrency topped 90,000 in 2021, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The reason for the uptick may be that crypto is becoming more mainstream.

A former JPMorgan Chase currency trader must spend eight months behind bars after a federal appeals court on Monday refused to overturn his sentence for plotting to manipulate European, Middle Eastern and African currencies. 

Citigroup has been released from a 2012 enforcement action that faulted its anti-money-laundering efforts. But company executives are expected to spend a lot of time over the next few years seeking to resolve a pair of more recent consent orders.

Deutsche Bank's offices in Frankfurt are being searched by law enforcement authorities over reports about potential money laundering that were filed by the lender.

Acting Director Himamauli Das acknowledged concerns from Democratic lawmakers that Fincen was moving too slowly to implement beneficial ownership rules but said the agency "will likely continue to do so, because our budget situation has required us to make significant trade-offs among competing priorities.”

The industry is preparing for a grueling federal rulemaking process to implement the Corporate Transparency Act, which was intended to streamline anti-money-laundering compliance. Analysts say the devil will be in the regulation’s myriad details.

Anchorage Digital Bank has an inadequate AML compliance program and will have to create a committee within 15 days to develop a remediation plan and submit progress reports, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The Federal Reserve permanently banned a former Goldman Sachs Group managing director from the financial industry for improperly using and disclosing the regulator’s bank-supervision information.