by Franca Harris Gutierrez, Boyd Johnson, Bruce Newman, Michael Dawson, Zachary Goldman, Rachel Dober, Michael Romais, Alina Lindblom, and Andrew Miller
This is Part III of a three-part post. For Part II, discussing SAR reform, click here. For Part I, discussing the collection of beneficial ownership information, click here.
by Franca Harris Gutierrez, Boyd Johnson, Bruce Newman, Michael Dawson, Zachary Goldman, Rachel Dober, Michael Romais, Alina Lindblom, and Andrew Miller
This is Part II of a three-part post. For Part I, discussing the collection of beneficial ownership information, click here.
Over the past few years, FinCEN and federal banking agencies have expressed general support for more effective, efficient, and innovative AML compliance programs, and both the letter and spirit of the NDAA represent another step in that direction.[1] Recent statutory and regulatory efforts have paved the way for concrete shifts in the compliance regime. In December, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”) and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (“OCC”) finalized parallel Notices of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRMs”) entitled Exemptions to Suspicious Activity Report Requirements. The regulators proposed modified regulations that, if finalized, would enable them to grant financial institutions broader exemptions to the SAR filing requirements in connection with innovative compliance approaches.[2]
by Franca Harris Gutierrez, Boyd Johnson, Bruce Newman, Michael Dawson, Zachary Goldman, Rachel Dober, Michael Romais, Alina Lindblom, and Andrew Miller
Anti-money laundering (“AML”) issues have been a focus of regulators and law enforcement for the past decade and will likely continue to be a priority issue area for the Biden Administration. The AML landscape is shifting considerably as a series of regulatory actions in the last months of 2020 and the January 1, 2021 passage of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 (“NDAA”)[1] — adopted with bipartisan support overriding President Trump’s veto—bring real change to the regulatory environment at the start of the new administration. Indeed, the NDAA is the most significant amendment to the AML landscape in a generation, since the adoption of the USA PATRIOT Act, and will require extensive implementation by the Treasury Department. The regulatory and legislative changes together have two principal themes: (i) a conscious effort to evolve AML compliance and the Bank Secrecy Act and its implementing regulations (collectively, the “BSA”) to make the system more efficient and effective; and (ii) adapting the BSA to a new generation of threats.