Bank of America, which owns a major office in Ballantyne Corporate Park, faces $1.2 billion in federal penalties for anti-money laundering failures.
The U.S. Treasury Department announced the enforcement actions Tuesday, Oct. 13, calling them the third-largest penalty in department history. The Charlotte-based bank owns a 140,000-square-foot office building in Ballantyne.
The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, a federal law requiring banks to help detect and prevent money laundering, according to the Treasury Department's announcement. Regulators said the bank failed to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions on time. More than $1 billion of that activity involved national security risks, including Chinese money laundering networks and suspected activity tied to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the penalties show that major financial institutions face consequences for compliance failures. He said the bank's shortcomings exposed the entire U.S. financial system to illicit finance risks.
The $1.2 billion penalty breaks down across multiple agencies. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) assessed the headline fine.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) levied a $750 million civil penalty, the largest in OCC history, which counts toward the total. The bank also reached an $11.6 million settlement with the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) over apparent violations of sanctions programs targeting Russia, Iran, narcotics and global terrorism.
Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould called the bank's response to its compliance problems "unacceptable," CNBC reported. Gould said the bank's violations warranted the record penalty.
The problems are not new.
The OCC issued a cease-and-desist order against Bank of America in December 2024, requiring the bank to fix its compliance program. Regulators said the bank still had not completed many of the required steps more than a year later. Treasury said the bank "prioritized its revenues" while limiting compliance resources, effectively outsourcing part of its responsibility for detecting suspicious activity to law enforcement and other financial institutions.
Bank of America spokesperson Christa Robinson acknowledged the gravity of the situation. "Financial crime compliance is serious, and we are responsible for getting it right," Robinson said, according to CNBC. The bank said it has invested billions in technology and thousands of employees to fight financial crime and called its remediation efforts "far along."
The penalty will result in a $1.2 billion non-tax-deductible charge in the bank's third-quarter results, reducing net income by about 17 cents per share, CNBC reported. The bank reported quarterly earnings Wednesday, Oct. 14. Bank of America stock fell about 2% in after-hours trading on Oct. 13, according to Axios.
The fine trails only a roughly $4 billion settlement with cryptocurrency exchange Binance in 2023 and an approximately $3 billion settlement with TD Bank in 2024, as first reported by the Associated Press.
Under the consent order, Bank of America must hire a third party to review suspicious transactions that went undetected and undergo independent reviews of its transaction monitoring and customer due diligence programs.
