Treasury Fines Bank of America $1.2 Billion Over Money-Laundering Failures
The Treasury Department announced a $1.21 billion enforcement package against Bank of America on Tuesday, the third-largest in its history, after the bank admitted willful violations of the Bank Secrecy Act.
The U.S. Treasury Department announced Tuesday that it is imposing a coordinated enforcement package of more than $1.21 billion against Bank of America, the country’s second-largest bank, for failures in its anti-money-laundering and sanctions programs.
Bank of America admitted that it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act, the 1970 law that requires banks to help the government detect and prevent money laundering. The package is the third-largest penalty in Treasury Department history and the largest ever imposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
How the $1.21 billion breaks down
The Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network assessed a $1.2 billion civil money penalty against the bank for failing to mitigate and report what it called priority national security risks, including Chinese money-laundering networks and illicit finance along the southwest border. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency concurrently assessed a $750 million penalty for what regulators described as a deficient and ineffective compliance program. The $750 million is credited against the FinCEN penalty, so the bank will pay an additional $450 million to the Treasury under that order.
Separately, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced an $11.6 million settlement with the bank over apparent violations of sanctions programs involving Iran, Russia, narcotics and global terrorism.
What regulators said went wrong
According to FinCEN, the bank’s failures ran from at least January 2018 through July 2025. The bank did not implement and maintain an anti-money-laundering program that met federal requirements, fell short on due diligence for correspondent accounts used by foreign banks, and failed to file suspicious activity reports on time. Regulators found more than $5 billion in suspicious activity that was not properly reported, about $1 billion of which touched priority national security concerns.
“When a bank of this size fails to meet its anti-money-laundering and sanctions obligations, the consequences extend far beyond its own walls,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement, adding that the actions show even the biggest financial institutions are not above the law.
Bank’s response and market reaction
“Financial crime compliance is serious, and we are responsible for getting it right,” Bank of America said in a statement. The bank said it worked with regulators to reach the resolutions, which it said stemmed from violations cited in a previously reported 2024 consent order from the Comptroller of the Currency and FinCEN’s investigation.
The bank’s shares fell about 2 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday. The announcement came a day before the bank’s scheduled third-quarter earnings report, in which the bank expects a non-tax-deductible $1.2 billion charge that will reduce net income by about $0.17 per share, according to a TradingView stock-news report.
No criminal charges accompanied the action, and no asset cap was imposed on the bank.
Reporting based on coverage by FinCEN, the Associated Press, CNN and Barron’s.
