A BSA analyst's job is easy to describe and hard to do well. An alert fires, a teller refers something, a 314(a) list produces a possible match, and the analyst has to work out whether what happened has a reasonable explanation or belongs in a suspicious activity report. Do it too cautiously and the bank files low-value SARs and drowns in alerts. Do it too loosely and the bank misses the one case that mattered.

Most analysts learn this on the job, from whoever trained them, with ...

Every currency transaction report and suspicious activity report a bank files ends up in the same place: FinCEN's BSA E-Filing System. The forms get most of the training attention, but the filing system is where a surprising number of real compliance failures happen. A SAR that was saved but never submitted, a batch file rejected for a schema error that nobody noticed, an acknowledgment that never arrived because the filer had no Secure Messenger access, a corrected CTR filed as a new report ...

Most SAR confidentiality failures are not leaks of the report itself. Nobody photocopies a SAR and hands it to a customer. What actually happens is smaller and more human: a teller tells a regular customer that "compliance flagged your deposits," a branch manager tells a business owner the account is being closed "because of a report we had to file," or a loan officer mentions to a colleague at another bank that a mutual customer "has a SAR on him." Each of those sentences reveals the ...

The SAR narrative is the part of a suspicious activity report that does the work. The structured fields tell a database who and how much; the narrative tells an investigator what happened and why it matters. FinCEN's own filing instructions put it plainly: the care with which the narrative is completed may determine whether the activity and its possible criminal nature are clearly understood.

It is also the part most often written badly. Narratives that list transactions without ...

Structuring is the federal crime of breaking up or arranging cash transactions to keep a bank from filing a currency transaction report. It is the offense the CTR rules created: once Congress required banks to report cash over $10,000, people with reasons to avoid that report started splitting deposits, spreading them across branches and days, and recruiting friends to make them. Congress responded by making the evasion itself illegal, regardless of where the money came from.

For ...

Regulation CC is one of the few consumer rules where federal law says, in so many words, that the bank must train its people. The Expedited Funds Availability Act requires every depository institution to take the actions necessary to fully inform each employee who performs duties subject to the Act of its requirements, and to maintain procedures reasonably designed to assure and monitor their compliance. Regulation CC repeats the obligation in 12 CFR 229.19(f): the bank must establish ...

Every bank that offers checking accounts publishes a funds availability policy, and most customers only read it after a hold has already annoyed them. For the bank, the disclosure carries more weight than its length suggests. It is the document that tells examiners what the bank promised, the yardstick every hold is measured against, and the first thing a plaintiff's lawyer will compare to the core system's actual behavior.

This guide is written for the people who draft, maintain and ...

A Reg CC hold is lawful in two ways. Either the bank is holding funds within the ordinary availability schedule, or it has invoked one of the exceptions in 12 CFR 229.13 that lets it go beyond that schedule. The first needs no special justification. The second needs a qualifying trigger, a hold no longer than the rule allows, and in most cases a written notice that says exactly why.

This guide takes the exceptions one at a time: the trigger, the extended hold period, and the notice.