US Treasury hits Bank of America with over $1.21 billion in AML and sanctions penalties
Victoria Shinder2 min readThe US Department of the Treasury announced on 14 October 2026 enforcement actions imposing more than $1.21 billion in penalties on Bank of America for violations of anti-money-laundering and sanctions law. Treasury calls it the third-largest penalty in its history and the largest ever imposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
Three actions.
- FinCEN assessed a $1.2 billion penalty for the bank's failure to mitigate and report priority national-security risks, including Chinese money-laundering networks and illicit finance along the US southwest border.
- The OCC assessed a $750 million civil money penalty for a deficient and ineffective BSA/AML compliance programme.
- OFAC announced an $11.6 million settlement over 475 apparent violations of sanctions programmes including those on Iran and Russia.
The release states the combined figure as "more than $1.21 billion" and does not set out how the FinCEN and OCC amounts relate to each other.
What the bank admits. In its resolution with FinCEN, Bank of America admits that it wilfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain an AML programme meeting the law's minimum requirements, to conduct due diligence on correspondent accounts for foreign financial institutions, and to file suspicious activity reports. According to Treasury, the bank leaned on law-enforcement inquiries and requests from other institutions instead of its own automated controls, and as a result failed to report over $5 billion of suspicious transactions on time — more than $1 billion of it linked to national-security and other priority risks.
The OCC's findings. The bank's transaction monitoring failed to properly monitor trillions of dollars in transactions, producing large numbers of late reports, and key BSA staff lacked training. The bank was already under a December 2024 cease-and-desist order and, more than a year later, was still failing to escalate potentially suspicious activity to investigators.
What happens next. The FinCEN consent order requires a third-party lookback to find and report transactions that went undetected, plus independent reviews of the bank's monitoring, due-diligence and data-governance arrangements. OFAC found the sanctions violations non-egregious and granted no reduction of the base penalty.
Source: US Department of the Treasury, "U.S. Treasury Announces Record Enforcement Actions Against Bank of America" — https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0657/