US regulator fines BofA’s wealth unit Merrill over SAR failures

Vidhya Edwards Munnangi

Tue, June 30, 2026 astatine 6:51 AM CDT 1 min read

Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated has resolved SEC charges tied to repeated failures to taxable suspicious enactment reports (SAR) betwixt April 2020 and September 2024.

The US regulator said the broker-dealer did not conscionable reporting and recordkeeping obligations and agreed to a $7.5m civilian penalty.

In its order, the SEC said Merrill utilized Bank of America Corporation's group-wide Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-Money Laundering programme arsenic portion of its ain SAR compliance process.

In a connection to Private Banker International, the slope said: "We support rigorous anti-money laundering practices. As we person said previously, we person been engaged with regulators connected this matter, and we continually reappraisal and heighten our AML systems to code evolving risks and study and observe suspicious activity." 

The bid said Bank of America operated transaction-monitoring bundle that bundled perchance suspicious enactment into "event groups" and gave those groups hazard scores.

The SEC said lone groups scoring supra a acceptable threshold were reviewed for imaginable SAR submissions, adjacent though interior investigation had shown, from astatine slightest April 2020, that immoderate lower-scoring groups would person led to SAR filings if they had been examined.

According to the order, Merrill did not reappraisal those lower-scoring lawsuit groups during the play successful question and, arsenic a result, galore SARs were not filed.

Without admitting the findings, Merrill accepted a cease-and-desist order, a censure and the $7.5m penalty.

The probe was carried retired by Nicholas Flath and overseen by Rebecca Reilly and Thomas P. Smith, Jr., from the SEC's New York Regional Office.

"US regulator fines BofA's wealthiness portion Merrill implicit SAR failures " was primitively created and published by Private Banker International, a GlobalData owned brand.