06/13/2005
04/18/2005
A customer's business is a local convenience store and he is obviously in the business of cashing checks on a regular basis and depositing those checks to his account at our bank. Occasionally, checks are cashed out to the benefit of the same person on the same day in an amount exceeding $1,000. As BSA Officer, I discussed this with the relationship manager and we decided to inform the customer that he might want to make sure he understands the requirements concerning operating as an unregistered MSB. He replied that he was confident that he was doing nothing wrong. Our question: What, if any, obligation do we have to (for instance) file a SAR, instruct him to not deposit checks that are subject to MSB regulations, or any other potential obligations we might have based on what we know about his activities that are subject to MSB regs?
04/18/2005
Per the BSA, an MSB does not include a bank, nor shall it include a person registered with, and regulated by the SEC or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Does this mean that I do not have to perform any enhanced due diligence on an MSB that is a 34 Act company? By enhanced due diligence, I mean determining whether the business has procedures to comply with applicable BSA requirements, whether the company has proper controls to monitor for suspicious activity and whether the company has procedures to ensure compliance with OFAC regulations
04/01/2005
01/17/2005
In the answer given by Ryan Rasske on "AML Requirements Upon Identifying an MSB", he stated, "It is up to the bank to conduct the proper due diligence on their MSB customers and ensure they are complying with the law." We are in the process of determining what our responsibility is as a bank to ensure that our customers are complying with the law. What specifically do we need to be doing to be sure that we are using "proper due diligence"?
01/01/2005
FEBRUARY
Get the HMDA data in by the end of the month - or sooner. Be sure to do a quality and edit check before sending in your data.
12/06/2004
Could you expand upon the implications of having cash-intensive retailers (i.e. grocery stores) who are registered with FinCEN as MSBs? It just came to our attention that because they're an MSB they cannot be exempted, nor can we exempt the grocery store portion of their business and continue to file on the MSB portion unless they're operated under separate TINs. If that's the case, a bank would often need to file a daily CTR, further clogging FinCEN's database. This seems like a regulatory policy that's contrary to the intention of the CTR process. Do we really want 260 more CTRs in the system for a legitimate business? Shouldn't the fact that they've registered with FinCEN make them legitimate and exemptable? Am I missing something? What solutions do you see to such a situation? I suspect many banks are struggling with this emerging issue and would welcome your guidance.
12/01/2004
When you purchase software, it isn't enough to take the salesman's promises at face value. In fact, believing the salesman's promises could be a problem. The salesman's goal is to make the sale.
02/16/2004
In order for me to practice enhanced due diligence I need to know if there are any particular indications of false driver's licenses and Visas?
01/19/2004
A former employee with access to corporate establishment documents uses them to open a corporate account with him/herself as an authorized signer. The true corporate officer discovers the account has been opened after checks made payable to the company are missing. The bank performed as much due diligence as possible in verifying the legitimacy of the corporation and obtained the ID of the authorized signer. Can the "true" corporate officer collect lost money from the bank or must they pursue legal action against the former employee?