No matter how ill considered this ruling is, willful noncompliance is absolutely not a plan.

As noted above, FinCEN has already heard from the ABA. Contact your state bankers association and pressure them to contact FinCEN as well. Write your own letter. Make your own call.

Whenever I hear a FinCEN presenter mention they have about 300 employees I'm reminded that is the approximate number of Spartans who held the pass at Thermopylae. The difference is that FinCEN does not have a natural rear guard. Their various constituencies surround them.

They oftentimes take criticism, harsh criticism, from the regulators and law enforcement for the stands they take in favor of banks. We do not read about it, but I give you my word that it happens. Don't think for a minute that the regulators would have homogenized their BSA/AML examination procedures without pressure from FinCEN or that field examiners don't bristle knowing that a banker can call the Helpline and get that examiner's half baked personal opinion overruled on the spot. In what other compliance topic is that even a remote possibility?

Sometimes we all make a decision that is so bad we really do not have to even admit we were wrong. Everybody in the room already knows it. As I said before, the ruling should never have been published. FinCEN needs political capital in its day to day operations and they cannot afford to expend it defending a decision that is indefensible.

"Sends them back?" How in the Sam Hill would they even know the bank was noncompliant? The information is not required on all armored car deliveries or pick ups. The violations could only be discovered in an on site examination.

You'd be better off getting advice from the back of a cereal box than from that person, but keep the e-mail anyway.

Exactly -- like going back to a Restore Point on a Windows-based computer after a bad move has corrupted the registry and thrown the operating system into chaos.

This Interpretive Ruling is an example of regulation by stealth. When no law has changed, no rule has changed, and (to our knowledge) no new armored car-related money laundering threats have emerged and an official interpretation surfaces which is so radical, so different from the way examiners and bankers alike have understood to be the reality that procedures and policies must be amended, employees retrained -- it is simply not right. A change of that magnitude must be made through rulemaking with the full procedural protections of the Administrative Procedures Act with notice and a full opportunity to comment. I believe that if this had been the subject of rulemaking, rational bankers with experience could have prevented this train wreck of a position from being finalized.

Please, FinCEN -- revisit this issue and reconsider this ruling.

I've been following this thread and just had to pipe in here.
All that come before me certainly have valid comments and concerns. I would like to add, who would have cash monitoring in place to detect that the transactions were made via armored car? There are receipts that indicate the shipment amount from each customer but what if that amount differs from the actual cash counted when processed at the bank. So this takes us back to medieval times of manually tracking and documenting?
Not to mention the other respective boxes that may be checked when Section B would be "blank" permitting for no known conductor. One being "mail" (not that someone would be crazy enough to mail in such large amount of cash) this means the mail carrier would need to be known!

This should have been a major FinCEN change presented with consideration for a comment due date and implementation date.

"Garbage in garbage out!"

Let's all lobby for this to make that U turn back to leave it the way it was.

Are any of you folks having trouble getting a response from FinCEN? I left a message with very specific questions on this ruling over a week ago and they haven't called back. I suspect they're pretty busy, but they're usually very prompt in returning a call.

I think the proverbial [censored] has hit the fan and they are trying to figure out a gracious way to back off of this position as they did with the idiotic interpretation on how to report sole-proprietorships not too long ago. Hopefully, they will react a little more quickly before banks spend untold thousands in redoing their processes.

We can only hope it's because they are strategizing on how to undo this madness and save face.

For my part, I'd be happy to forgive and forget if the whole thing is undone, and chalk it up to experience. On balance, I like FinCEN and its people, who are doing a heck of a job given their position in the middle, between their financial services and law enforcement constituencies. But given the breadth of the swath their rules cut, I can't let an errant stroke like this one go.

I called FinCEN this morning regarding this issue, and they responded back to me within 2 hours. The FinCEN rep read a statement word-for-word saying that FinCEN is looking at this ruling, and that it only applies in situations where multiple customers jointly contract with an armored car company to make their deposits. All other situations would follow the old 'check mark the armored car box' process. The rep also stated that more written guidance from FinCEN is forthcoming, but she couldn't provide any dates as to when (big surprise).

Thank you, I think that's good news.



Presumably, the people who applied for the ruling would know that. However, since the ruling does not say that, there is no basis for such a restrictive reading by any third party reviewer.

It should never have been published...

Wow - this blog is really getting to be something to read! Anyway - I have some questions - 1. If the bank contracts with the armored car service then charges back the cost to the customer, I am still thinking the contract is in the bank's name and thusly would be an "agent" of the bank (i.e. CTR with only armored car box checked). Yes? No? Other thoughts? 2. Also, if an armored cars service is contracted by the customer(s) and one or more of the customers is properly filed as a CTR-E with the bank, would the armored car driver also be "exempt" becase they are an "agent" of the customer and therefore, I don't need to file a CTR on the armored car agent? And if the armored car service brings in multiple deposits (or cash out/exchange) for a mix of CTR and CTR-E customers, do we only report the cash for the CTR customers? Lastly - as in one of the earlier blog comments FinCEN advised that the effective date of all this would be the date posted (i.e. August 13, 2009?), anyway, should it be the bank's policy to refuse the deposits if the driver refused to provide identification? Or as an industry are we giving ourselves a "grace period" to advise customers that we will refuse deposit /withdrawals after such a date if ID is not provided? (Explaning that to both bank staff / management - say nothing of the customers will have to be carefully handled - you know the saying - "Don't shoot the messenger".) Thanks.

I don't have to deal with CTR filing issues anymore so this is really easy for me to say, but I don't think I would do anything until additional guidance is issued by FinCEN. I would document an internal file with this guidance showing I was in the process of obtaining clarification for staff training and implementation ASAP.

As it currently stands, Elliott,

1. If the bank contracts for the service, the bank contracts for the service, regardless of whether it passes through the charge.
2. If the armored car delivery consists of a mix of exempt and non-exempt customers' deposits (all of whom have contracted with the armored carrier), you ignore the deposits of the exempt customers and report the others, assuming they aggregate at either the conductor or customer level to more than $10,000.
3. Nowhere in the BSA rules does it say you have to refuse a CTR-reportable transaction if someone refuses to provide personal info, although some banks have a policy of doing so. Given the nature of this rule, however, and the fact that your customers are not in control, I think you'd be shooting yourself in the foot to refuse the deposits based on an armored car guard's refusal to cooperate.

Thanks for the input - not my intention to shoot myself in the foot. It would make my high heels really uncomfortable. However, I was revising branch procedures - so your comments are most helpful. Have a great day - Thanks.

I'm with Brenda C. I said early on I was not going to change anything yet. Too much controversy for them not to back off this one. I don't believe it is willful blindness at this point. I see, I understand and I believe they will change it.

We called FinCEN again after reading the post from BSAJobSecurity. They got back to us within a few hours and we heard a very different story from when we spoke with them a couple of weeks ago.

-We still have to aggregate by armored car employee as a transactor. However, we only have to gather the personal info of the armored guard if the customers jointly contract the armored car service. Otherwise, we may select the armored car box in section B.

-There will be additional guidance, but no ETA.

-As far as the double reporting (armored car deposits and employee of the company makes deposits) - this rep said the financial institutions could choose to have one huge CTR, or have two separate CTRs.

The plot thickens.

I have shifted tactics and am calling all of the agents I know in law enforcement (at IRS-CI, FBI, etc) and let them know how this change would affect their data. I encouraged them to contact FinCEN directly to register their protests. Everyone I spoke with was quite alarmed at the potential ramifications of diluting the information by combining non-related transactions on the same CTR with a single dollar amount.

Maybe this will help stoke the flames since it will be the USERS of the data who are registering their complaints.

Note to self: Don't annoy UpperMW...

Serenity now ... serenity now ... whoooohhhh. Much better

Just as a side note to all the speculation of whether to change our filing procedures or not I finally decided to call my regulator. After all, they are the ones that will cause me the most grief if we dont do it they way they think it should be done.
I was told by my OCC guru that we should begin filing the CTRs as of yesterday (the day I spoke with him) with no need for backfiling and file them as the ruling was written. If a transaction is brought in by armored car or picked up by armored car, we ask for the driver's personal information and if they will not provide it, put the information of the armored car company in the section B. He thinks the same as we do, that FinCEN will come out with a different ruling but in the meantime, we need to be compliant with the ruling.

Can't we just exempt the Armor Car Companies?

No. You can only exempt persons on whose behalf transactions are completed, and the armored car company isn't one of those persons.

Anyone know of any job postings at a "Bait, B-B-Que and Beer" joint for which I can apply?

One last question on this and I will leave it alone until this is recalled by FinCEN.

We are filling the section B out using the drivers name, armored car services address, no SS# (big surprise) but what are you using as the date of birth? The driver will not give any personal information other than their employee badge number and our automated system will not accept the filing without a DOB.

Any suggestions on how to get around this?

I hate to push this back up to the top of the Thread again, but I was at an AML conference recently where one of the Directors of FinCEN spoke and stated that they would be issuing clarification to this soon. He stated that it was intended as a response to a very specific question that they received - and hinted that it had blown up in to something that they never intended. He also hinted that the "clarification" could be a total withdrawal. Keep in mind that when I say "hinted", I am giving my interpretation (and that of others at my table) on what little he actually said about it.

My questions: (1) Has anyone heard recently of any impending updates from FinCEN on this? Or has anyone made any recent calls to FinCEN's helpline where they were given advice that differs from what has previously been stated in this thread? (2) Now that it has been awhile since this came out, has everyone enacted policies & procedures to comply with this? If so, would anyone be willing to share some details about you did? We have found it very difficult to nearly impossible to implement.