The annual number of suspicious activity reports filed by money services businesses fell by 14 percent in 2012 compared with the previous year, the U.S. Treasury Department said in a report Wednesday.
Penny stock fraud and soon-to-be introduced customer due diligence regulations should be foremost on the minds of compliance officers at small securities firms, believes Kenneth Cherrier, senior vice president and chief supervisory officer at Overland, KS-based Waddell & Reed, Inc.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Agency (Finra), which is responsible for ensuring that securities firms have effective anti-money laundering programs in place, had a tough time doing that in 2011 after being denied access to suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by the firms it oversees.
A U.S. Treasury Department effort to better ensure the confidentiality of suspicious activity reports contributed to a delay in regulatory penalties by the nation's non-governmental regulator of brokerage firms.
It's a message that has been hammered home repeatedly by the U.S. Treasury Department: the confidentiality of data included in suspicious activity reports is sacrosanct.
The chief self-regulatory organization examining broker-dealers for anti-money laundering compliance is again allowed to have direct access to suspicious activity reports, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission confirmed Thursday.
Securities regulators are likely to increasingly penalize firms that fail to identify the beneficial owners of accounts controlled by so-called "master" accounts, according to Alma Angotti, the former senior counsel in the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's enforcement department.
Some firms under the purview of the nation's largest independent securities regulator are failing to meet anti-money laundering compliance standards despite spending enough money to do so, according to an agency regulator.
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.
The largest non-governmental regulator of U.S. securities firms expelled a Southfield, MI, retail foreign currency broker and permanently barred its chief compliance officer for repeated rule violations, including anti-money laundering, accounting and capital requirements failures.
The largest non-governmental regulator of U.S. securities firms said Thursday that it had fined three companies over $1.25 million for failing to implement "reasonable" anti-money laundering compliance programs.
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.
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.
E*Trade has been fined $1 million by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for inadequate anti-money laundering policies and procedures. The action follows on a $1 million penalty levied by the Securities and Exchange Commission six months ago against the on-line brokerage.