Introduction: The Bank Secrecy Act and Related Requirements

This section will review Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Treasury Department, regulations (31 CFR 1010.100 et seq.) that require you to make reports of certain transactions with customers and keep records pertaining to certain customers and transactions. Specifically, we will look at the following:
  1. The requirement that you file reports on certain transactions involving currency;
  2. The requirement that you report and keep records of “suspicious activities;”
  3. The requirement that you file reports on certain transfers of currency or monetary instruments into or out of the United States;
  4. The requirement that you file reports on interests in foreign financial accounts;
  5. The requirement that you maintain certain records; and
  6. The requirement that you establish procedures for complying with the first five requirements.

The first five of these requirements come, as we said, from Treasury Department regulations, although the second—reporting suspicious activities—is duplicated in regulations of the financial regulatory agencies. The final requirement—that you have compliance procedures—comes solely from regulations of the individual financial regulatory agencies (the Federal Reserve Board, 12 CFR 208.14; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, 12 CFR 326.8; the Comptroller of the Currency, 12 CFR 21.21; and the National Credit Union Administration, 12 CFR 748.2.

The Treasury Department has given certain administrative authority under the Bank Secrecy Act to the Director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, also known as FinCEN. We will refer to FinCEN in a number of places throughout this section.

Before we look at these provisions, however, we will start with a summary of initial amendments to the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). These amendments are found in Title III of the USA PATRIOT Act (the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” Act of 2001)..