Bank of America reaches $11.6M settlement with Treasury over sanctions violations
The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced an $11,662,930 settlement with Bank of America, N.A. over 475 apparent violations of multiple sanctions programs.
The violations involved sanctions programs targeting Russia, Belarus, Iran, Burma, Somalia, narcotics, and global terrorism. According to OFAC, the apparent violations occurred when Bank of America processed payments involving blocked banks, failed to appropriately prioritize alerts for customers who were exact name- and date-of-birth matches to blocked persons, failed to promptly update watchlists following OFAC designations, and mishandled two business accounts associated with blocked persons due to human error.

OFAC determined that the apparent violations were non-egregious but largely not voluntarily self-disclosed by Bank of America, which factored into the settlement amount.

