I recently discovered that my institution used to file SARs summarizing no suspicious activity was found during the 90 day follow up. I was told that this is the way commercial banks do it.

Of course, i was appalled but i wanted some feedback from the community. Any thoughts? I refuse to do it.

I'm not sure where this practice got started, but I have seen it before. It is a wasted effort.

I would term that to be "defensive SAR filing". Waste of time for us and subsequent readers. We should thoroughly document in our internal files and call it a day.

I totally agree.

Oh, the required report to report that you have nothing to report!

Stop it.

We are a community bank, and we do not file negative SARs

Same here - just a memo to file explaining why it wasn't continued.