The U.S. regulator of securities firms could soon issue standalone fines against companies that file "disturbingly" few regulatory reports about suspicious trades, according to a top enforcement official.
A recent regulatory penalty citing a Brown Brothers Harriman executive made a compliance director at Bank of America wonder about his future personal liability, attendees of a business forum heard Tuesday.
Internet portals that facilitate crowd-sourced fundraising will need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to comply with anti-money laundering rules proposed by the U.S. regulator of broker-dealers, say industry consultants.
As investment firms look toward new markets to turn a profit, the individuals charged with auditing their compliance program should take note. Bad audits remain a common thread of costly regulatory penalties.
U.S. financial institutions are taking a closer look at accounts held for stock brokers managing money on behalf of multiple parties in the wake of governmental warnings and sanctions-related settlements.
Changes to how and how often securities firms report suspicious activity are helping to clarify the scope of a long-familiar financial crime: microcap fraud.
U.S. law enforcement officials and regulators have queried the nation's financial intelligence unit about securities settlements that use the world's top financial messaging platform, according to the agency's director.
A New York brokerage firm violated the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to report suspicious activity related to a scheme to bilk third-party investors, securities regulators said Tuesday.
Narcotics traffickers are exploiting the sales of international securities traded in the U.S. market to better layer drug proceeds sent from the United States to Colombia, according to a federal official.
Securities transactions are increasingly being used by South American drug traffickers to launder illicit proceeds, says Manny Muriel, an attaché in the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) Bogota, Colombia office.
The effect of a planned whistleblower program expected to have an impact on anti-money laundering compliance departments will likely be mitigated by low funding and other issues, say consultants.
The largest nongovernmental regulator of U.S. securities firms has expelled a Westlake Village, CA-based company for failing to implement anti-money laundering controls, the organization said Monday.
The country's largest independent securities regulator fined Scottrade $600,000 Monday for alleged deficiencies in its anti-money laundering program, including the company's over reliance on a manual transaction auditing system.
Penalties issued by the Financial Industry Regulatory Agency for anti-money laundering violations are on course to outnumber similar fines levied by the self-regulatory organization in 2008, according to agency data.
Hedge fund manager Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty Thursday to bilking investors out of $65 billion and laundering the money as part of a Ponzi scheme that dwarfed similar swindles.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined a Michigan brokerage firm $225,000 for securities violations and poor anti-money laundering controls, the second such enforcement action against a broker this year.
The Bush administration has added six government agencies, including three financial regulators, to a federal task force charged with fighting mortgage and securities fraud, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
The investigation into a $50 billion securities fraud by a former chairman of the Nasdaq stock market may mean more scrutiny for banks that took him as a client, according to a financial investigator.
Stock fraud and associated money laundering involving penny stocks are on the rise, compliance experts say.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees nearly 5,100 brokerage firms, and its predecessor organization, the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), have issued fines in 80 AML-related disciplinary actions against securities firms since 2005, including 16 this year.