On October 13, 2026, the fined more than $1.2 billion over and failures, according to the . The bank is the second-largest American lender.
Regulators found the bank failed to flag and report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions tied to foreign criminal networks and cross-border crime.
The $1.2 billion headline figure comes from the Treasury's , and it absorbs a $750 million civil penalty from the . That OCC penalty is the largest in the regulator's history.
Separately, the Treasury's settled with the bank for $11.6 million over apparent violations of sanctions programs targeting Russia, Iran, global terrorism, and international narcotics trafficking.
The scale of the failure matters because Bank of America processes hundreds of trillions of dollars in global transactions each year. More than .
The bank was already under a to fix compliance gaps under the , which requires banks to file when they spot potential criminal activity.
The December 2024 order means regulators had already told the bank to fix this. The new penalty is not a first warning — it is the consequence of a failure that continued after the bank was put on notice.
Regulators accused management of minimizing the problems rather than fixing them. OCC head Jonathan Gould called the violations "egregious and continued," and said key risk staff lacked the expertise to run the bank's compliance program.
Under the new , the bank must hire an to audit past transactions and find suspicious activity the bank missed.
The action lands after the OCC fined $350 million for similar long-running compliance breakdowns.
Two of the largest U.S. financial institutions fined within days of each other, both for the same category of failure, points to a coordinated enforcement push rather than an isolated case.
The penalty hit just ahead of the bank's third-quarter earnings release. The stock fell 1.8% in after-hours trading.