Tag: OFAC

Categories
Compliance Into the Weeds

Compliance into the Weeds: Extreme Networks: The “Imminent Threat” Limit on Voluntary Self-Disclosure Credit

The award-winning Compliance into the Weeds is the only weekly podcast that takes a deep dive into compliance-related topics, literally going into the weeds to explore a subject in greater depth. Looking for hard-hitting compliance insights? Look no further than Compliance into the Weeds! In this episode of Compliance into the Weeds, Tom Fox and Matt Kelly discuss the DOJ and OFAC actions involving Extreme Networks.

The company’s Russia office sold advanced networking equipment to Avangard, a Russian state-owned defense firm on U.S. sanctions lists via majority ownership by Almaz-Antey. After a whistleblower report in April 2022, Extreme investigated and briefed its board by June but did not disclose until investigative reporters contacted the company in October with additional facts, prompting a renewed inquiry and self-disclosure by year-end. DOJ deemed the disclosure driven by an “imminent threat,” denied voluntary self-disclosure credit, and issued a non-prosecution agreement rather than a declination, with $2.5 million in combined penalties. The episode examines uncertainty about what changed, how DOJ benefits from quality disclosures, and OFAC’s emphasis on timely, effective screening and heightened diligence in high-risk jurisdictions like Russia.

Key highlights:

  • The enforcement actions
  • Imminent Threat Debate
  • OFAC Red Flags
  • Screening Lessons
  • Self Disclosure Policy

Resources:

Matt in Radical Compliance

Tom

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Twitter

LinkedIn

A multi-award-winning podcast, Compliance into the Weeds, was recently named one of the Top 25 Regulatory Compliance Podcasts, Top 10 Business Law Podcasts, and Top 12 Risk Management Podcasts. Compliance into the Weeds has been awarded a Davey, Communicator, and W3 Award, all for podcast excellence.

Categories
Blog

BOA Part 4: 20 Lessons Every Corporate Compliance Professional Should Learn from BOA

A manufacturer, technology company, retailer, or energy business doesn’t need to operate a bank to recognize the management problems this series examines. A commercially important relationship presents unresolved concerns. A monitoring tool produces reassuring statistics but does not provide adequate coverage. A vendor fails to deliver a critical update. Employees identify weaknesses, but corrective action remains incomplete.

Bank of America’s documents provide specific examples of these issues. FinCEN emphasizes management decisions, monitoring deficiencies, and customer due diligence failures. OFAC adds findings involving vendors, technology changes, operational mistakes, and remediation.

A non-banking compliance professional’s task is to translate those findings, not copy the bank’s obligations into a different industry. Bank-specific suspicious activity reporting and correspondent-account requirements should not be treated as universal corporate obligations. OFAC’s compliance framework, by contrast, expressly addresses organizations beyond financial institutions, including entities subject to U.S. jurisdiction and certain foreign entities with relevant U.S. connections. Applicability still depends on the organization’s activities and circumstances.

In this concluding Part 4, I offer 20 lessons learned as practical applications of the record from the FinCEN Consent Order and OFAC’s Enforcement Release.

Governance, Culture, and Management Accountability

FinCEN found that management focused on resource implications and revenue while identified risks persisted without commensurate controls. That is the factual foundation for the first four lessons.

1. Revenue is not a risk mitigation measure.

When a sales team argues that a distributor is indispensable, acknowledge the commercial importance and return to the unresolved risk. Require the business to identify the controls supporting continued engagement. The decision should explain why those controls are adequate, not merely why termination would be expensive. Commercial value belongs in the discussion, but it should not substitute for evidence of risk mitigation.

2. Escalation must produce a decision and follow-through.

Assign a decision-maker, a response deadline, and an accountable owner for every material compliance escalation. Record the reasoning behind the decision and the actions that follow. Where management retains a relationship subject to conditions, specify what happens when those conditions are not met. A recommendation should not disappear into repeated meetings without a documented disposition.

3. Resources should follow the risk.

Prepare resource requests around the work needed to address identified exposure: investigative volume, overdue reviews, data gaps, geographic expansion, and testing requirements. Where funding is declined, document the resulting limitations and proposed alternatives. Do not make a control appear more effective by excluding work merely because the organization lacks the capacity to perform it.

4. Board reporting should show unresolved exposure.

Report significant exceptions, recurring deficiencies, overdue corrective actions, and failed effectiveness tests alongside completed activities. Identify the executive responsible for the response and the decisions requiring board attention. Directors do not need every case file. They need a clear picture of material risks that remain uncontrolled and the evidence supporting management’s assessment.

Due Diligence and Understanding Business Relationships

FinCEN describes customer profiles that did not adequately incorporate third-party payments, geographic exposure, and information developed during the relationship. It also found deficient due diligence involving the bank’s own foreign branches and affiliates. FINCEN consent order 

5. Due diligence is a continuing process.

Set triggers to reassess when ownership, products, payment practices, geography, or transaction volumes change. A distributor’s original approval does not answer questions raised by materially different activity three years later. Updating a risk rating should also lead to an assessment of whether monitoring, contractual protections, payment controls, or other safeguards need to change.

6. Understand who is paying, for whom, and why.

For a non-banking business, relevant questions may arise when an unrelated entity pays a customer invoice, commissions are redirected, or refunds are requested to a different account. These circumstances do not automatically prove misconduct. They are reasons to obtain a supportable business explanation and apply appropriate controls before proceeding.

7. Familiarity and affiliation are not substitutes for assessment.

Apply risk-based review to longstanding partners, subsidiaries, and affiliated entities as well as unfamiliar third parties. The question is not simply whether the organization knows the entity. It is whether the organization understands its current activity, relevant counterparties, and exposure. Corporate affiliation may affect the information available, but it should not end the inquiry.

8. Evaluate connected relationships.

When an investigation identifies a problematic intermediary, assess whether the same person, beneficial owner, address, payment account, or commercial arrangement appears elsewhere. FinCEN describes the bank failing to reassess continuing customers after exiting a connected customer. The corporate application is to avoid treating each third-party file as an isolated record when the relevant risk involves a network of relationships. FINCEN consent order

Technology, Data, and Control Design

The Event Processor findings address unsupported design choices, inadequate responses to testing, poorly governed suppression rules, and incomplete monitoring coverage. These findings form the foundation for the next four applications. FINCEN consent order

9. Require evidence that automated decisions are supportable.

For each material automated compliance control, document its purpose, inputs, decision rules, limitations, and owner. Determine who can change it and who independently evaluates its performance. Ask the same questions whether the tool uses fixed rules, statistical models, or AI. The technology’s sophistication should not determine the rigor of its governance.

10. Measure what the system misses.

Test selected activity that falls below thresholds, bypasses automated review, or comes from products and business units with limited coverage. Examine delays and missed issues. A lower alert count may represent improvement, deterioration, or a change in the population being monitored. Do not treat reduced workload as proof of reduced risk.

11. Make data governance part of compliance governance.

Identify the information each control needs and trace it from its source through the control and into any resulting investigation. Assign responsibility for missing, inconsistent, or inaccessible data. FinCEN’s required review explicitly addresses data accuracy, completeness, responsibilities, information flows, and error detection. The corporate application is to treat those matters as control dependencies, not solely information technology concerns. FINCEN consent order

12. Put controls around exceptions.

Whitelists, overrides, automatic dismissals, and other exclusions should have a documented rationale, approval authority, review date, and testing requirements. Ensure that an exemption granted for one purpose does not disable an unrelated control. Revisit exceptions when the underlying facts change. An exception should remain a controlled decision, not become an undocumented permanent feature.

Vendors, Operational Execution, and Independent Challenge

OFAC’s compliance considerations emphasize organizational responsibility despite third-party reliance, controlled technology changes, and training supported by testing and accessible guidance. OFAC

13. Outsourcing does not transfer performance responsibility.

For a critical screening, monitoring, or due diligence provider, verify that the service actually operates within the company’s process. Test updates, escalation procedures, outages, and known limitations. A contract and a vendor assurance are useful starting points. They don’t prove required information reaches the right system or that employees act on it appropriately.

14. Treat technology changes as compliance events.

Before a migration, assess data transfer, control continuity, expected alert volume, staffing, and fallback procedures. After launch, test the real process rather than rely entirely on preproduction results. Define who can pause implementation or impose temporary safeguards if performance is inadequate. Completing the migration should not be the only measure of success.

15. Test whether employees can perform the required task.

Use realistic scenarios for sales, procurement, finance, logistics, and other relevant functions. Ask employees to demonstrate when they would stop a transaction, seek advice, or escalate an exception. Provide usable instructions and accessible expertise. Training completion is an administrative measure. Correct execution is the outcome the organization needs to establish.

16. Protect independent challenges.

FinCEN describes repeating an unfavorable test, with the second result supporting the existing threshold. For other organizations, the application is to preserve original findings, document methodological changes, and subject material disagreements to independent review. A test may legitimately need correction. The process should explain why the correction is valid, not just produce a more comfortable answer. FINCEN consent order

Detection, Investigations, and Sustainable Remediation

17. Use external warnings to assess internal detection.

FinCEN distinguished useful cooperation and information sharing from excessive dependence on external and manual sources to identify relevant risks. Apply that distinction carefully. A whistleblower report does not, by itself, prove that a program failed. The question is whether controls designed to detect the issue should have identified it earlier and what the external information reveals about their limitations. FINCEN consent order

18. Investigate the underlying problem, not only the first incident.

When a control fails, determine whether the same weakness affects other transactions, employees, systems, business units, or jurisdictions. Document the rationale for the investigation’s scope and revisit it as evidence develops. OFAC’s criticism of the bank’s initially narrow lookback illustrates why resolving the first identified transaction may leave the broader problem undiscovered. OFAC

19. Require immediate protection and proof of lasting effectiveness.

Use appropriate interim safeguards while developing longer-term remediation. Then distinguish completion of the change from verification of its effectiveness. FinCEN’s undertakings separately address interim controls and subsequent testing of enhancements. For a corporate program, issue closure should identify the evidence reviewed, the remaining limitations, and who independently validated the result. FINCEN consent order

20. Organize disclosure and cooperation before the response becomes fragmented.

Establish decision rights, preserve evidence, develop the facts, and assess disclosure with counsel under the applicable regime. Track requests and verify that responses are complete and consistent. OFAC’s treatment also demonstrates the importance of precision: voluntary disclosure affected the base calculation for some violations, but the settlement received no additional reduction from that base. Different forms of credit should not be treated as interchangeable. OFAC

Turn the Lessons into an Action Plan

This case study’s value is not the number of lessons a compliance team can recite. It is whether the organization uses them to examine decisions and controls that matter to its own business. Start with three lessons that present the greatest exposure in your organization.

For each, identify the responsible executive, the control being relied upon, the latest evidence that it works, and the corrective action needed where that evidence is missing. Record what must happen immediately and what can reasonably be addressed through a longer-term plan.

Then take the results to the appropriate management or board committee. Do not report only that the review was completed. Report what the organization learned, what remains unresolved, and how effectiveness will be verified. The four-part series began by distinguishing between identifying a risk and addressing it. It ends by applying the same discipline to your own program.

The final board and CCO question: Where has our organization identified a material compliance risk, accepted a plan to address it, and failed to verify that the plan actually worked? This is the same basic question that concludes the last major section of the 2024 Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Program: Does the corporation’s compliance program work in practice?

Conclusion

Part 4 translates the Bank of America enforcement record into 20 practical lessons for compliance professionals outside banking, without treating bank-specific obligations as universal corporate requirements. The article organizes those lessons around governance and accountability, continuing due diligence, technology and data, operational execution, and sustainable remediation. Its central message is that commercial importance cannot substitute for risk mitigation; an escalation is not resolved merely because it has been discussed. Automation does not establish that a control works.

For CCOs, the practical response is to connect material concerns to accountable decisions, test what systems miss, verify vendor performance, and confirm that employees can execute required procedures. Remediation should include interim protection and independent evidence that corrective measures are effective. The concluding assignment turns these lessons into action: select three areas of greatest exposure, identify responsible executives, examine the evidence supporting existing controls, and address the gaps. The objective is not to adopt another company’s compliance program, but to use its documented failures to test and improve your own.

What it all Means for Compliance

The Bank of America enforcement actions illustrate the difference between maintaining compliance processes and achieving compliance effectiveness. Part 1 examined management’s response to known concerns, including decisions that prioritized revenue and resources while risks persisted without commensurate controls. Part 2 examined how unsupported design choices, monitoring gaps, and inadequate responses to testing undermined automated detection. Part 3 connected sanctions failures to broader questions of vendor oversight, operational execution, investigation scope, and durable remediation. Part 4 translated those findings into an action agenda for non-banking compliance professionals.

All of this makes the case for treating compliance as a business discipline grounded in governance, reliable information, accountable decisions, and verified results. CCOs should be able to demonstrate what happens after a concern is raised, while boards should ask what remains unresolved and whether management’s response has reduced the exposure. The ultimate test is not whether an organization can describe its compliance program. It is whether it can demonstrate that its controls work, management acts on adverse information, and corrective action addresses the underlying risk.

Categories
Blog

BOA Part 3: The Failure to Connect the Dots: Sanctions, AML, and Effective Remediation

A payment-routing problem, a stale watchlist, an incorrectly prioritized alert, and an employee processing error may initially seem like separate operational incidents. OFAC’s Enforcement Release asks compliance leaders to examine the broader pattern. Its compliance considerations emphasize management oversight that identifies potentially systemic problems, implements durable solutions, and prevents errors from recurring across the enterprise.

Today, in Part 3, we focus on that connection. Fixing the first visible error is necessary. Establishing whether the same weakness exists elsewhere is the next responsibility.

A Separate Action with Familiar Governance Problems

According to the Enforcement Release, Bank of America agreed to pay $11,662,930 to resolve potential civil liability for 475 apparent violations involving approximately $14.8 million in transactions. The conduct involved sanctions programs targeting Russia, Belarus, Iran, Burma, Somalia, narcotics, and global terrorism. OFAC classified the matter as non-egregious but largely not voluntarily self-disclosed. These are separate findings from FinCEN’s anti-money laundering case. Do not treat them as findings about identical transactions merely because they reveal related governance concerns. Those concerns include control design, alert handling, staffing, technical changes, investigation scope, and the response to known weaknesses.

Payment Routing: A Control Must Work Across the Process

Bank of America used a third-party routing directory to help determine intermediary banks for certain cross-border payments. Some routing was automated; some could be entered manually. Once payment details were generated, the bank screened them for sanctions compliance.

In March 2022, the bank became aware that the directory included blocked banks and that some payments were still being processed to or through them. OFAC identified several causes: screening updates had not yet reflected new designations, analysts incorrectly dismissed alerts, or suppression rules automatically released payments based on earlier false-positive decisions.

OFAC ultimately identified 403 transactions totaling approximately $14.34 million routed through 35 blocked banks between February 2022 and March 2025. The bank implemented an automated directory solution in January 2023, but the release describes broader payment-processing failures beyond that implementation.

The compliance lesson is to test the complete process. A current directory does not establish that manual entry works correctly. A screening alert does not establish that the alert is properly resolved. A prior false-positive decision does not establish that the same disposition remains appropriate after a sanctions designation.

Alert Prioritization: Strong Information Must Produce an Appropriate Response

OFAC describes a design flaw that assigned low or medium priority to customers whose names and dates of birth both exactly matched those of blocked persons.

Because those alerts were not classified as high priority, review was delayed. Three designated individuals conducted 31 transactions using bank or credit card accounts. The bank fully implemented the relevant correction in February 2024, six months after initially identifying the issue. This is a control-design issue with an operational consequence.

The existence of a queue does not establish effective prioritization. Compliance leaders should be able to explain which information triggers immediate attention, which activity may continue while an alert awaits review, and what interim protection applies when the prioritization logic is known to be deficient.

Watchlist Updates: Vendor Performance and Internal Processing Both Matter

Between May 24 and June 28, 2023, a third-party vendor error prevented the watchlist file Bank of America used from reflecting changes to OFAC’s sanctions list. The bank did not identify the error until July, approximately a month after another U.S. bank blocked one of the affected payments downstream.

A separate failure in February 2025 involved technical problems in the bank’s own systems. The bank failed to implement a vendor update reflecting the previous day’s designations and processed transactions for a designated ship management company. The bank fully activated the relevant updates several days later; it then conducted a lookback and self-disclosed those transactions.

The two events should not be collapsed into a single vendor failure. One originated with the vendor. The other involved the bank’s processing of an update. Together, they illustrate why oversight should verify the entire update process: issuance, receipt, loading, activation, and operation. A delivery confirmation is not proof that screening uses the new information.

Employee Errors and Technology Changes Need a Control Response

The Enforcement Release also describes a business account that remained unrestricted after an analyst dismissed an alert involving its blocked beneficial owner. A subsequent rescreening during a platform migration generated another alert, but the bank did not review it promptly. OFAC attributed the delay to the volume of migration-generated alerts and inadequate preparation for that workload.

In another incident, personnel moved $189,869 from restricted business accounts into a new unrestricted account after misunderstanding how to handle accounts with a blocked authorized signer. Sanctions personnel identified the error and blocked the new accounts before the customer conducted further transactions involving the funds.

The second intervention mattered. It prevented further activity. It did not eliminate the need to examine why the transfer had been authorized. Calling an event human error should begin the root-cause inquiry, not end it. Was the instruction clear? Did the employee have access to appropriate guidance? Were approval rights properly defined? Should another control have prevented the action?

What the Penalty Says About Disclosure and Cooperation

OFAC determined that 413 apparent violations were not voluntarily self-disclosed and 62 were. Its base penalty calculation already reflected that distinction: the applicable scheduled amounts for the former and one-half of transaction value for the latter. The settlement equaled the resulting base penalty. Consequently, saying that the bank received no recognition whatsoever for voluntary disclosure would be inaccurate.

The more precise lesson is that OFAC granted no additional reduction from the base penalty. The release expressly states that OFAC did not mitigate the penalty for remedial measures or cooperation. OFAC also identified a tolling agreement as a mitigating factor but concluded that the circumstances did not justify a net reduction.

OFAC described piecemeal or incomplete submissions and delayed responses that slowed its investigation. It also criticized the bank’s initially narrow lookback into blocked-bank payments, with the full scope identified only after further OFAC direction. For compliance leaders, the lesson is to organize the response early. Coordinate investigation scope, document preservation, factual development, disclosure decisions, remediation, and regulatory responses rather than handling them as disconnected tasks.

FinCEN’s Undertakings Show What Verification Requires

The FinCEN Consent Order requires independent work to address historical suspicious activity, the effectiveness of transaction monitoring, customer and foreign correspondent due diligence, and data governance. Its lookback begins in January 2022 and extends through completion of relevant monitoring remediation, subject to the Consent Order’s scope provisions.

Two aspects are particularly instructive. First, the Consent Order addresses interim controls while remediation remains underway. A future system improvement is not treated as an answer to present exposure. Recommended interim measures may include manual processes, periodic reviews, and product-focused analyses. Second, the end-state review includes subsequent testing to validate whether enhancements meaningfully mitigate the relevant risks. Implementation and effectiveness are separate questions.

That distinction should shape remediation reporting. The board needs to know both whether the change was completed and whether testing demonstrates that it works.

Three Key Takeaways

First, investigate recurring themes across incidents. Similar errors may reveal shared weaknesses in data, approvals, staffing, training, or change management.

Second, treat disclosure and cooperation as disciplined processes. Determine the scope, preserve the record, develop the facts, and respond completely and promptly.

Third, distinguish implementation from effectiveness. Maintain interim safeguards and require independent evidence before declaring a material issue resolved.

The board question: Are we receiving evidence that remediation has reduced the risk, or only reports that remediation activities have been completed?

Summary

In Part 3, we examined how BOA’s sanctions failures exposed weaknesses across payment routing, alert prioritization, watchlist updates, and employee execution. The central lesson is that seemingly separate incidents should prompt an examination of shared weaknesses in oversight, resources, and operational processes, rather than a series of isolated fixes. We also considered vendor accountability, controlled technology changes, appropriately scoped investigations, and coordinated disclosure and cooperation.

FinCEN’s requirements for interim safeguards and subsequent effectiveness testing illustrate why implementing corrective measures and proving that they work are separate responsibilities. For CCOs, this means identifying root causes, preventing ongoing exposure, and independently validating the response. For boards, it means demanding evidence of reduced risk rather than accepting reports of completed activities. The measure of remediation is whether the underlying control weakness has been effectively addressed.

Join Us Tomorrow

Tomorrow in Part 4, we shift from Bank of America’s enforcement record to the decisions compliance professionals outside banking face. We translate BOA’s documented failures into 20 practical lessons covering governance, ongoing due diligence, technology and data, vendor oversight, employee execution, investigations, and remediation. The objective is not to apply bank-specific obligations to every company, but to examine how comparable weaknesses could arise in customer relationships, distributor networks, procurement processes, payment controls, and automated compliance systems.

Each lesson links a finding to a practical action, giving CCOs a framework to review their own programs. The series concludes with an assignment: select three areas of greatest exposure, identify accountable owners, examine the evidence that existing controls work, and address what remains unresolved. The final question is whether your organization has accepted a plan to address a material risk without verifying that it worked.

Categories
Blog

BOA Part 2: The $5 Billion Blind Spot About Compliance Technology

An automated compliance system can operate exactly as configured and still fail to perform the function the organization needs.

That distinction is central to FinCEN’s findings concerning Bank of America’s proprietary transaction monitoring system, Event Processor. The FinCEN Consent Order attributes missed and delayed reporting of more than $5 billion in suspicious activity to deficiencies in internal controls and other parts of the bank’s anti-money laundering program. That figure reflects suspicious activity that was not reported on time, not a determination that every dollar represented criminal proceeds.

In Part 1, we examined management decisions about known risks. This installment examines how those decisions were embedded in technology, testing, and investigative processes. In Part 2, we review the natural follow-up to that statement: the lesson is not that automation is inherently unreliable. Automating a decision does not remove the obligation to establish that the decision is supportable.

Inside Event Processor

Bank of America developed Event Processor to manage transaction monitoring alerts. The bank’s records describe an interconnected model system intended to support identifying, investigating, and reporting suspicious activity. Its development also addressed a practical problem: there were not enough investigators to review all the alerts being generated.

The diagram on page 10 of the Consent Order illustrates the basic process. Individual alerts received weighted risk scores and were generally consolidated into customer-level Event Groups. Unless an automatic promotion applied, the group ordinarily did not become an investigative case until its combined score reached 20 points. Stakeholders initially set that threshold, and it remained in place until December 2023.

The timing rules were equally important. An Event Group generally needed to reach the threshold within 13 months of its oldest active alert. Older alerts could remain in the group but no longer contribute to its score. Consequently, retirement of an alert did not establish that the underlying concern had been investigated or resolved. For compliance leaders, the distinction is consequential. A system that generates an alert does not necessarily ensure meaningful review.

The Testing Challenged the Design

The Consent Order describes repeated evidence that the system’s risk weights did not adequately reflect the risks being identified. One internal report found that an ATM large-cash-deposit risk factor carried only one point in Event Processor even though the bank’s testing associated it with a SAR yield of 56.75%. FinCEN also notes that SAR yield can be useful but is not the only metric for evaluating a control. The issue was the bank’s failure to respond appropriately to evidence that its design was not addressing its risks.

The chart on page 21 makes the threshold problem particularly clear. In tested samples, Event Groups scoring 19 points, just below the investigative threshold, had SAR yields of 45.49% in the first quarter of 2022 and 45.03% in the second quarter. Earlier testing of groups scoring 20 to 24 points, which qualified for investigation, had produced yields of approximately 34%. FINCEN consent order

These results did not establish the precise performance of every unreviewed transaction. However, they challenged the justification for leaving the threshold unchanged. Management should have asked, “What does this evidence tell us about the activity we are not investigating?”

When Efficiency Becomes the Wrong Objective

FinCEN found that the bank’s testing often focused on whether yields above and below the threshold differed statistically, without adequately considering the implications of missed suspicious activity. The bank also lacked an objective benchmark to assess whether the threshold was appropriate.

In another example, a calibration model reduced the number of cases requiring investigation by more than 8,200. An accompanying report described the associated loss of SARs as permissible without explaining how that conclusion had been reached.

This distinction matters for any automated compliance process. Reducing unnecessary reviews can legitimately improve a process. Reducing reviews is not, by itself, evidence of improvement. Consider an expense-monitoring tool. Eliminating repetitive, demonstrably irrelevant alerts may improve performance. Raising thresholds until the review team can handle the remaining volume does not establish that the excluded transactions present acceptable risk.

That is an application of the case, not a finding about an expense system at Bank of America. The transferable principle is that the performance objective must remain tied to the compliance purpose.

Exceptions Can Defeat the Primary Control

The Event Processor also used rules that rescored certain risk factors to zero. The Consent Order describes those rules as developed through an ad hoc and subjective process without adequate testing. When the bank discontinued the logic in December 2023, approximately 150,000 active Event Groups had triggered one or more aspects of it.

One particularly useful example involved customers exempted from certain currency transaction reporting requirements. Event Processor used that status to suppress some alerts, even though the applicable exemption did not remove the obligation to report suspicious activity. The broader control lesson is to examine the legal and factual basis for every exception.

An exception for one purpose should not silently become an exemption from a different control. A previously approved customer should not automatically become exempt from future review. A false-positive determination based on yesterday’s information should not permanently determine tomorrow’s result.

Data Gaps Limit What Technology Can Detect

FinCEN found that the bank’s systems did not adequately distinguish among types of negotiable instruments, such as checks and money orders, which limited targeted monitoring. The Consent Order also describes insufficient monitoring and data quality issues involving credit card activity. The lesson for compliance technology governance begins before model selection.

What information does the control need? Is that information captured consistently? Does it reach the monitoring system? Can investigators retrieve and use it? Who is responsible when a required field is incomplete or a relevant product lacks coverage? A sophisticated analytical tool cannot compensate for an unidentified gap in the information supplied to it.

Recalibration Revealed the Scale of the Problem

Following regulatory engagement, Bank of America lowered the investigative threshold in December 2023 to 10 or 12 points, depending on the Event Group. A limited lookback identified nearly 8,900 SARs involving approximately $4 billion in activity that the bank had failed to identify and report under the prior parameters.

The bank estimated that the revised thresholds would double ongoing monthly investigative volume and require about 750 additional personnel, plus another 800 consultants for the one-time lookback. These were the bank’s staffing estimates, not evidence that every position had already been filled. For a CCO, those numbers make the resource question concrete. Technology configuration and staffing cannot be governed as unrelated decisions when one determines the other’s workload.

The Application to AI Governance

The Consent Order describes Event Processor as a proprietary interconnected model system. It does not establish that it was a generative AI system. Nevertheless, its governance failures provide useful comparison points for organizations deploying AI in compliance. FINCEN consent order

NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework organizes risk management around Govern, Map, Measure, and Manage. Applied here as an analytical framework, those functions suggest a practical sequence: assign accountable ownership, define the intended use and relevant risks, test actual performance, and act when the evidence identifies deficiencies.

ISO/IEC 42001 provides a complementary management-system approach for establishing, maintaining, and continually improving AI governance. Neither framework is presented here as a standard that FinCEN found Bank of America had violated. The objective is not to prohibit innovation. It is to ensure that innovation remains explainable, testable, and subject to effective challenge.

Three Key Takeaways

First, validate the decision rules, not merely system availability. Establish why thresholds, weights, prioritization rules, and exceptions address the intended risk.

Second, test what the control misses. Include below-threshold activity, incomplete product coverage, data gaps, and delayed escalation.

Third, connect technology governance to resources and remediation. A finding that requires additional review must lead to a supportable operational response.

The CCO question: Can you demonstrate that your compliance technology addresses the intended risk, or only that it operates according to its configuration?

In Part 2, we examined how BOA’s Event Processor transaction monitoring system failed to translate automated alerts into effective detection and investigation. FinCEN identified unsupported design choices, inadequately calibrated risk weights, poorly governed suppression rules, and monitoring gaps that persisted despite testing that challenged the system’s effectiveness.

After the bank lowered its investigative thresholds, a limited lookback identified nearly $4 billion in suspicious activity that it had failed to identify and report under the previous parameters. The central lesson for CCOs is that reducing alert volumes or investigative workloads does not, by itself, demonstrate improved compliance. Effective technology governance requires reliable data, supportable decision rules, independent testing, attention to missed activity, and resources sufficient to address the findings. These principles also provide practical guidance for AI oversight. An automated control is measured by whether it addresses the intended risk, not simply whether it operates as configured.

Join us Tomorrow

Tomorrow, Part 3 broadens the analysis from transaction monitoring to sanctions compliance, examining OFAC’s findings on blocked-bank payment routing, improperly prioritized alerts, delayed watchlist updates, and mishandled accounts associated with blocked persons. These incidents raise a broader management question: when several controls fail in different ways, does the organization investigate each error separately, or does it examine whether they reveal shared weaknesses in oversight, resources, and operational execution?

We will explore the importance of vendor oversight, controlled technology changes, appropriately scoped investigations, and coordinated disclosure and cooperation. We will also examine the difference between completing a corrective action and proving it works, including the role of interim safeguards and independent validation. Boards and compliance leaders must ask whether management has corrected individual incidents or verified that the underlying controls work across the enterprise.

Categories
Blog

BOA Part 1: $1.2 Billion Compliance Failure: When Red Flags Meet Revenue

A compliance program is tested when someone identifies a risk that the business would prefer not to address. The question is not whether compliance can produce a memorandum. The question is whether the organization makes a timely, supportable decision and implements controls that address the concern.

The Bank of America enforcement record provides a detailed examination of that problem. FinCEN (Consent Order) describes repeated internal warnings, testing that identified weaknesses, and customer relationships that continued without controls commensurate with the risks. Its findings place management decisions about revenue and resources at the center of the compliance failure.

For chief compliance officers, the central lesson is straightforward: Identifying a material risk is the beginning of compliance work, not its completion. Over this four-part blog series, we will review the FinCEN Consent Order, OFAC’s Enforcement Release, and the Department of the Treasury’s Press Release to mine each for how this was allowed to occur, how it continued, the governance failures, the marginalization of compliance, and the penalties assessed. Today in Part 1, we examine the governance failure at the heart of the Bank of America enforcement actions: compliance personnel identified significant risks, but management did not ensure those concerns led to timely, effective corrective action.

Understanding the Enforcement Actions

On October 13, 2026, the Department of the Treasury announced enforcement actions involving FinCEN, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Foreign Assets Control. Treasury described combined penalties exceeding $1.21 billion for anti-money laundering and sanctions failures.

The penalty structure matters. FinCEN assessed $1.2 billion but credited the bank’s $750 million OCC payment, leaving $450 million payable under the FinCEN Consent Order. OFAC’s separate Enforcement Release states a settlement of $11,662,930. Adding the full FinCEN and OCC assessments together would therefore overstate the combined financial penalty.

The legal posture also matters. Bank of America admitted the facts and violations in the FinCEN Consent Order. It expressly limited its admission of willfulness to the civil Bank Secrecy Act enforcement standard. By contrast, OFAC resolved potential civil liability for apparent violations. These documents should not be characterized as a criminal guilty plea.

The Warnings Were Already Inside the Organization

Consider the relationship identified in the FinCEN Consent Order as Customer A, an online marketplace connecting sellers of salvaged vehicles with domestic and international buyers. The bank had maintained accounts for this customer since 1995. By 2022, compliance personnel had identified concerns involving third-party payments, limited visibility into the source of funds, and repeated fraud-related investigations. In July, compliance recommended that the customer’s accounts be considered for closure. Subsequent internal analysis identified more than 100 customer-related cases between 2020 and August 2022.

This was not simply a disagreement about a customer’s reputation. Compliance was identifying a weakness in the bank’s ability to understand the funds moving through the relationship. An important distinction must remain clear. The Consent Order records that no evidence shows Customer A orchestrated the underlying fraud. The concern was that its accounts appeared to have received and moved fraud proceeds, creating risks the bank needed to address. Suspicion concerning transactions is not proof that the customer knowingly participated in the underlying misconduct.

That distinction makes the compliance lesson more useful. An organization does not need to prove a business partner is a criminal before deciding the relationship requires stronger controls.

When Commercial Importance Becomes the Answer to a Different Question

Following an internal meeting in September 2022, the relationship manager prepared a memorandum describing Customer A as a “large and valued client” generating approximately $6 million in annual revenue. The memorandum emphasized the broader commercial relationship and the business line’s support for retaining it. Compliance personnel continued asking how the underlying risks were being mitigated. FINCEN consent order

Here is the governance problem: commercial value and risk mitigation answer different questions. Revenue explains why the business wants to retain a relationship. It does not establish that the relationship can be maintained within an effective control environment.

Nor does compliance independence require that every recommendation to terminate a relationship prevail. FinCEN expressly states that account closure is not the only appropriate response to heightened financial crime risk. Enhanced monitoring, restrictions on products or services, and other risk-based controls may be appropriate. The real question is whether the alternative works.

A defensible decision to retain a high-risk customer should explain what will change, who will implement it, what evidence will show it works, and what happens if the customer does not meet the agreed conditions. Without those elements, an alternative mitigation plan can become a way to defer the original decision.

A Mitigation Plan Is Not the Same as Mitigation

In March 2023, more than six months after compliance recommended closure, the relationship manager summarized proposed measures, including limiting payments to registered buyers or dealers. Compliance withdrew its closure recommendation based on the communication and implementation of those measures, while reserving the possibility of revisiting the decision.

However, Customer A continued processing third-party payments through its Bank of America account until June 2025. The bank did not adequately update the customer’s risk profile, ongoing monitoring, or other due diligence measures to address the continuing practice. Some other changes were implemented, but the central payment risk persisted.

This is where compliance activity and compliance effectiveness separate. A meeting is an activity. A mitigation plan is an activity. A customer assurance is information. None, standing alone, establishes that the risk has been reduced. For the CCO, the missing discipline is verification. When the organization decides to continue a relationship subject to conditions, those conditions need an owner, an implementation date, evidence requirements, and consequences for nonperformance.

Resources Are Also a Governance Decision

FinCEN found that management’s approach to transaction monitoring was influenced by the resources required to investigate additional cases. When remediation began, the bank estimated that investigative volumes would double and that approximately 750 additional personnel would be needed. FinCEN concluded that the bank had likely avoided hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance-related expenditures during the relevant period. That was FinCEN’s assessment, not a separately calculated figure of realized profit.

The business lesson is not that every compliance function should receive every requested dollar. Resource decisions need to address the actual risk. Management should not resolve a capacity problem by treating the activity that exceeds capacity as less important without a supportable risk basis.

What the CCO and Board Should Ask

As a comparison framework, the DOJ’s Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs (ECCP) examines whether a program is well designed, adequately resourced and empowered, and effective in practice. It also asks whether managers tolerate greater compliance risks to pursue revenue and how the company responds when compliance raises concerns. These are useful analytical questions here, not the legal standards under which FinCEN resolved this case.

Board oversight provides another comparison. In Marchand v. Barnhill, the Delaware Supreme Court emphasized the need for a good-faith effort to establish board-level monitoring of a critical compliance risk. Caremark liability involves a demanding bad-faith standard, not automatic liability whenever a control fails. The Bank of America documents discussed here are not Caremark judgments against its directors.

The practical board questions nevertheless follow naturally. Which material compliance recommendations remain unresolved? Which business decisions depend on mitigation that has not been verified? Which deficiencies have appeared repeatedly without an effective response? Those questions move oversight beyond receiving presentations to examining whether management is controlling the risk.

Three Key Takeaways

First, require decisions, not indefinite escalation. Material concerns need accountable decision-makers, documented reasoning, deadlines, and follow-through.

Second, separate commercial justification from control effectiveness. A valuable relationship may be retained, but its revenue does not demonstrate that its risks are mitigated.

Third, verify the conditions supporting the decision. Keep an approved remediation plan open until the organization has evidence that the relevant controls work.

The CCO question: When the business rejects or modifies a compliance recommendation, can you demonstrate that the alternative actually reduced the risk?

Today we examined the governance failure at the heart of the Bank of America enforcement actions: compliance personnel identified significant risks, but management did not ensure that those concerns produced timely, effective corrective action. FinCEN’s findings describe an organization that prioritized customer revenue and resource considerations while known risks persisted without commensurate controls.

The central lesson is not that compliance must prevail in every disagreement or that every high-risk relationship must be terminated. Decisions to retain those relationships must rest on demonstrable risk mitigation, not commercial importance alone. For CCOs, this means establishing accountable decision-makers, deadlines, documented reasoning, and verification that agreed measures work. For boards, it means examining unresolved exposure rather than merely receiving reports of completed activities. A mitigation plan does not establish that a risk has been mitigated. The organization must verify the result.

Join us Tomorrow

Management decisions about compliance don’t stay confined to committee meetings and customer relationship discussions. They also shape the technology that determines which risks receive attention and which remain uninvestigated. In Part 2, we turn to Bank of America’s Event Processor transaction monitoring system and FinCEN’s findings concerning unsupported design choices, investigative thresholds, alert suppression, gaps in monitoring coverage, and inadequate responses to testing.

Our focus shifts from whether management acted on known concerns to whether its automated controls could identify and escalate the relevant activity. We will examine the difference between reducing investigative workload and improving compliance effectiveness, with practical applications for data governance, model validation, and AI oversight. Every CCO must ask whether your technology addresses the intended risk, not simply whether it operates according to its configuration.

Categories
Compliance Into the Weeds

Compliance into the Weeds: Amex AML Enforcement: Credit Card Risk, SAR Failures, and Board Accountability

The award-winning Compliance into the Weeds is the only weekly podcast that takes a deep dive into compliance topics, literally going into the weeds. Looking for hard-hitting compliance insights? Look no further than Compliance into the Weeds! In this episode of Compliance into the Weeds, Tom Fox and Matt Kelly discuss the recent OCC and Federal Reserve enforcement actions against American Express.

The penalties included a $350 million civil penalty, cease-and-desist orders, and extensive compliance obligations tied to weaknesses in customer due diligence, suspicious activity reporting, staffing, and risk assessment. Tom highlighted that Amex processed billions of transactions, many ordinary credit-card transactions, showing banks must know all customers, not just high-dollar activity, and noted regulators’ broader pattern of similar actions across the industry as financial innovation outpaced compliance investment.

Matt noted that regulators depend on SARs as critical inputs for broader enforcement “mosaics,” explaining why SAR failures draw intense scrutiny. The orders’ notable feature is direct board involvement, requiring a board-level compliance committee and action plan to hold management accountable, with a strong focus on end-to-end documentation and evidence trails; they see no facts suggesting the egregious, employee-involved criminality seen in TD Bank.

Key highlights:

  • Industry Pattern and Root Causes
  • Innovation as Compliance Risk
  • Board Oversight Mandates
  • Why SARs Matter
  • DOJ Risk and TD Bank Comparison
  • Disjointed Compliance and Fixes

Resources:

Tom in the FCPA Compliance Report, Part 1 and Part 2

Tom

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Twitter

LinkedIn

A multi-award-winning podcast, Compliance into the Weeds, was recently named one of the Top 25 Regulatory Compliance Podcasts, Top 10 Business Law Podcasts, and Top 12 Risk Management Podcasts. Compliance into the Weeds has been awarded a Davey, Communicator, and W3 Award, all for podcast excellence.

Categories
Blog

Re-Calibrating Risk Assessments: Uncovering FTO and TCO Exposure in Cartel-Driven Economies

This blog continues our series focusing on the upcoming ACI Forum on Cartels, TCOs, and Compliance in Latin America and why it is so timely. It is also why compliance officers need to understand that this is not simply another enforcement trend. It is a structural change in how risk must be assessed, governed, and managed. Today, I want to explore why you need to recalibrate your risk assessment in light of the US’s shift in classifying cartels from criminal organizations to Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs).

For years, many companies treated cartel risk as a regional security issue, a physical safety issue, or a narrow sanctions-screening issue. That approach is no longer sufficient. Cartel-driven economies now create enterprise risk across sales, supply chain, procurement, logistics, human resources, community relations, government affairs, security, and internal controls. The CCO must help the organization move from episodic screening to a dynamic, evidence-based risk assessment model that identifies where the business may be exposed to Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and Transnational Criminal Organization (TCO) risks.

The legal and enforcement environment has shifted. Executive Order 14157 established a process for certain international cartels and other organizations to be designated as FTOs or Specially Designated Global Terrorists, and described those organizations as threats to U.S. national security, foreign policy, and the economy. OFAC later issued an alert identifying eight designated organizations and warning that companies with operations in, or exposure to, high-risk jurisdictions where designated cartels are active should assess their sanctions compliance controls. That is the compliance lesson. This is not simply a legal list update. It is a risk assessment reset.

Cartel-Driven Economies Change the Risk Ranking Model

Traditional compliance risk assessments often rank risk by country, business unit, transaction value, government touchpoints, and third-party type. Those variables still matter. But cartel-driven economies require additional factors: territorial control, coercive influence, infiltration of local business networks, labor pressure, logistics-route control, cash intensity, proximity to ports or borders, public security risks, and the likelihood that a legitimate counterparty may be owned, controlled, taxed, extorted, or otherwise influenced by criminal organizations.

The ranking model should distinguish between three types of exposure. First, direct exposure, where a company deals with a designated party or a party it owns or controls. Second, indirect exposure, where a supplier, distributor, customer, logistics provider, labor broker, or security vendor is connected to cartel-linked actors. Third, environmental exposure, where the company operates in a geography or sector where coercion, extortion, or criminal facilitation is a predictable operating condition.

The DOJ’s Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs (ECCP) asks whether third-party management is risk-based, integrated into vendor management, supported by business rationale, tied to appropriate contract terms, and subject to ongoing monitoring. Those questions should now be applied not only to anti-bribery risk, but also to FTO and TCO risk.

Create an Internal FTO Working Group

A company cannot manage this risk through sanctions screening alone. The CCO should establish an internal FTO working group with a clear charter, executive sponsorship, and board reporting. The group should include compliance, legal, sanctions, AML, procurement, sales, finance, logistics, security, HR, government affairs, community relations, internal audit, and enterprise risk management.

Its mandate should be practical: identify exposures, refresh risk rankings, define escalation protocols, review high-risk contracts, approve enhanced due diligence standards, monitor emerging typologies, and track remediation efforts. It should also define when the company will suspend a transaction, reject a counterparty, exit a relationship, seek external counsel, notify insurers, or brief the board. This working group should meet frequently at the outset, then move to a risk-based cadence. Its output should not be a memo that sits on a shelf. It should produce a revised heat map, a prioritized counterparty review list, an action tracker, and control enhancements that can be tested by internal audit.

Leverage Existing Risk Assessments

The most efficient approach is not to create a wholly separate FTO risk assessment. The better approach is to integrate FTO/TCO risk into existing assessments. Your FCPA risk assessment already identifies government touchpoints, customs brokers, permitting issues, gifts and entertainment, charitable donations, intermediaries, consultants, and high-risk payments. Those same data points are highly relevant to cartel exposure because criminal networks often exploit local permitting, customs clearance, transportation, public security, and procurement systems.

The business and human rights assessment also provides critical intelligence. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights recognize a corporate responsibility to respect human rights through due diligence that avoids infringing on the rights of others and addresses adverse impacts with which the business is involved. In cartel-affected markets, human rights due diligence can reveal forced labor, threats against workers, community intimidation, unsafe security practices, land-access disputes, migrant exploitation, and labor-broker abuse.

Sanctions, AML, trade compliance, cybersecurity, and fraud risk assessments should also be mined. Look for recurring names, addresses, beneficial owners, banks, payment patterns, shell entities, shared directors, unusual routes, unexplained subcontractors, and counterparties that appear across unrelated business units.

Review Major Contracts and Customers for FTO/TCO Risk

Companies often focus due diligence on suppliers and intermediaries, while under-reviewing major customers. That is a mistake. A customer can create sanctions, money-laundering, books-and-records, reputational, and material-support risks. The company should identify major contracts in high-risk geographies and sectors, then re-rank them based on ownership transparency, payment behavior, sector exposure, government interaction, logistics routes, and local operating conditions. High-risk contracts should include enhanced representations, beneficial ownership update obligations, audit rights, sanctions, and FTO/TCO clauses, payment transparency requirements, subcontractor disclosure, termination rights, and controls over cash, commissions, rebates, donations, sponsorships, and community payments.

A contract should move into enhanced review when the business cannot explain the counterparty’s commercial rationale, when pricing is uneconomic, when payment comes from unrelated parties, when revenue spikes in cartel-affected regions, when the counterparty refuses beneficial ownership disclosure, or when local employees report pressure to use a particular vendor, union, broker, transporter, or security provider.

Detect Commingling of Legitimate and Illegal Activity

The core challenge is commingling. Cartels do not always operate through obviously illicit entities. They use logistics companies, fuel businesses, casinos, real estate, import-export companies, labor brokers, charities, community organizations, and professional service providers.

Recent enforcement actions show the point. Recently, the US Department of the Treasury announced multiple CJNG-linked fuel schemes involving cross-border smuggling, falsified customs documents, and shell companies. OFAC also described cartel-linked casino activity used to launder proceeds and integrate illicit funds into the legitimate financial system. For compliance professionals, these examples reinforce a familiar truth: a company’s legal form is not the same as its risk profile.

Detection requires data and local intelligence. Compare invoices to actual services. Review customs documentation against logistics activity. Test whether vendors have employees, assets, facilities, and capacity. Analyze payment flows for round-dollar amounts, rapid pass-through activity, third-party payments, and mismatches between business size and transaction volume. Monitor hotline reports for references to threats, forced vendors, security payments, labor pressure, and community demands.

Functions That Must Be in Scope

Supply chain must map critical suppliers, second-tier exposure, logistics corridors, warehousing, border crossings, ports, and emergency sourcing decisions. HR must assess labor brokers, recruitment channels, employee intimidation, workplace violence, the risk of retaliation, and escalation pathways for threatened employees. Community relations must review donations, sponsorships, local foundations, land-access payments, and community intermediaries. Union relations must assess whether labor organizations or labor contractors are being used as pressure points. Government affairs must evaluate permitting, customs, inspections, police interaction, and local political exposure. Security must review private security providers, public security coordination, incident response, travel protocols, and extortion procedures. The board should ask one question above all others: where could the company be doing legitimate business through a channel that criminal actors influence, control, or monetize?

Practical Takeaways

CCOs should refresh the risk assessment now, not after a transaction is called into question. Build the FTO working group, integrate existing FCPA and human rights intelligence, re-rank major contracts and customers, and test controls for commingling. The objective is not perfection. The objective is a documented, risk-based, board-visible process that shows the company understands its exposure, updates its controls, and acts when the risk profile changes.

The Cartels, TCOs & Compliance in Latin American conference will feature these topics and many more. For information and registration, click here. For a complete list of the agenda, click here. You can receive a 10% off the price by using the Discount Code D10-999-CPN26.

ACI is the sponsor of today’s blog.

Categories
Everything Compliance

Everything Compliance: The Summer Potpourri Edition

Welcome to a revamped Everything Compliance. We have a new host, Adam Turteltaub, and a new panelist, Rebecca Walker, who joins returning regulars Matt Kelly, Jonathan Armstrong, and Karen Moore for the next iteration of Everything Compliance. 

  • Matt Kelly highlights OFAC’s $1.05M settlement with FTI Consulting for indirectly providing services to sanctioned VTB Bank via a law firm payment conduit and creating a prohibited extension of debt when invoices went unpaid, emphasizing OFAC’s message that indirect dealings are treated like direct ones. 
  • Karen Moore reviews the NFL Rooney Rule’s intent and criticism; the Brian Flores discrimination lawsuit, which is moving forward in open court after the Supreme Court declined to compel arbitration; and Florida’s attorney general’s subpoena challenging the rule under state civil rights law, alongside trends in discrimination charges and potential changes to EEO-1 data reporting. 
  • Rebecca Walker shares NAVEX 2026 survey findings linking leadership “say vs. do” gaps to higher violations. 
  • Jonathan Armstrong covers an Italian Garante fine (€190,000) against ITA Airways for overly broad digital forensics and GDPR process failures, underscoring the importance of scoping, vendor management, and documentation.

 

The members of Everything Compliance are:

The award-winning Everything Compliance is a part of the Compliance Podcast Network.

Categories
Compliance Into the Weeds

Compliance into the Weeds: OFAC’s Warning Shot: FTI Consulting Fined for Indirect Dealings with Sanctioned Bank

The award-winning Compliance into the Weeds is the only weekly podcast that takes a deep dive into a compliance-related topic, literally going into the weeds to explore it in greater depth. Looking for some hard-hitting insights on compliance? Look no further than Compliance into the Weeds! In this episode of Compliance into the Weeds, Tom Fox and Matt Kelly discuss a recent OFAC enforcement action fining FTI Consulting $1.05 million for a sanctions violation involving indirect dealings with Russia’s state-owned VTB Bank.

FTI provided economic analysis for VTB in litigation, but, knowing VTB was sanctioned, used a law firm as an intermediary to invoice and receive payment, which OFAC said does not avoid liability because prohibitions apply to indirect transactions as well as direct ones. OFAC doubled the base penalty of $525,000 explicitly to promote future compliance by similarly situated companies, signaling strong disapproval of “middleman” structures. The case also involved unpaid invoices that became an impermissible extension of credit to a sanctioned entity, highlighting the need for rigorous contract and payment-term review beyond basic sanctions screening and for dedicated sanctions expertise.

Key highlights:

  • Introducing the OFAC Case
  • Middleman Billing Scheme
  • Why Screening Misses Indirect Risk
  • Did Compliance Approve It?
  • OFAC Expectations and Capability
  • Penalty Doubled Warning Shot
  • Unpaid Invoices as Credit Extension

Resources:

Matt in Radical Compliance

Tom

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Twitter

LinkedIn

A multi-award-winning podcast, Compliance into the Weeds was most recently honored as one of the Top 25 Regulatory Compliance Podcasts, a Top 10 Business Law Podcast, and a Top 12 Risk Management Podcast. Compliance into the Weeds has been conferred the Davey, Communicator, and W3 Awards, all for podcast excellence.

Categories
2 Gurus Talk Compliance

2 Gurus Talk Compliance – Episode 78 – A Brave New World Edition

What happens when two top compliance commentators get together? They talk compliance, of course. Join Tom Fox and Kristy Grant-Hart in 2 Gurus Talk Compliance as they discuss the latest compliance issues in this week’s episode!

 Stories This Week Include:

  • SBF Applies for Pardon
  • Post Wells Issues for Profit Disgorgement
  • Sad Day for College Sports
  • Hungary uses AI to track Orban’s corruption
  • Meetings are Useless
  • Big Banks and New Tokenization
  • OFAC fines FTI
  • What is MNPI
  • The compliance job market
  • A Florida man writes on the whiteboard outside the house that he is not home. Arrested nonetheless

Resources:

Kristy

Kristy Grant-Hart on LinkedIn

Order Kristy’s updated, 10-year new edition of How to Be a Wildly Effective Compliance Officer by clicking here.

Tom

Check out the top compliance handbook, The Compliance Handbook, 7th edition, published by LexisNexis. Visit the LexisNexis® Store at https://lexisnexis.com/fox20

To save 20% on The Compliance Handbook: A Guide to Operationalizing Your Compliance Program, please reference or enter promotion code: FOX20.

Offer expires December 31, 2026. Offer applies to new orders only, before shipping and taxes are calculated and shipped to a U.S. address. A discount will be applied to each applicable product after the code FOX20 is entered. Discount does not apply to current subscriptions, renewals, or updates. Certain exclusions and other restrictions may apply. Void where prohibited. View full terms here.

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Twitter

LinkedIn