A SAR was rejected because "One, or more, invalid characters were present in the submitted file." (Narrative)

I looked through the instructions, but can't find a listing of what characters are not accepted.

Does anyone know? (Thank you )

I'm stumped. There are several "box" entries that prohibit certain kinds of characters, most frequently hyphens and slashes, but I do not see any announcement that special characters cannot be used in the narrative.

From a friend:

Read your post on special characters on a break...Maybe they are still filing the legacy form.

Just thought I would point this out from the BSA Electronic Filing Requirements For Suspicious Activity Reports by Depository Institutions (SAR-DI) (Form TD F 90-22.47) :

REQUIRED. Enter a detailed explanation/description of the Suspicious Activity. Upper case characters only. Do not use carriage returns, low values, or special characters.


The admonition against using "carriage returns" remains in the instructions for the Form 111. Love it!

I know it wasn't carriage returns or tabs. BSAEFiling was no help - they said to retype the narrative & resubmit.

*sigh*

Slashes or hyphens?

He said if I used slashes or hyphens before with the new form (which I have), then they should have been fine. I've also used astericks for years to help seperatate out the muddled flow of sentences.

I'm starting to think it was a glitch with my software - so I resubmitted and we'll see....

In the electronic SAR filing requirements in various places it refers to hyphens, parentheses, periods and spaces as special characters that should not be used in certain fields:

http://bsaefiling.fincen.treas.gov/news/FinCENSARElectronicFilingRequirements.pdf

Has anyone else experienced this?

What turned out to be the cause?

I have not seen any of the banks that I work with experience this.

These characters are precluded in address lines by our software system:

!@#$%^&*()+=[]\\\';,.{}|\"":<>?`~_

Otherwise we've had no issues to date in the narrative and we often abbreviate : A/C#

we often abbreviate : A/C#

Number of air conditioning units???

The instructions specifically prohibit certain characters in some of the boxes. My interest is only in the narrative.

I can produce the error when I copy and paste from a Word document, but do not comprehend why. Formatting?

The last time I got an error like that, it was because I had an invalid character in my attachment CSV file name. I forget what the character was though. I know it says it's in your narrative, but I think there are some flaws....and the helpdesk wasn't helpful for me in my case either. I actually taught the helper something that day

So it turned out that it was because I copied & pasted from a Word format into my software.

Our software company has now put in a "fix" so that it strips out all character returns and tabs. Ever since then, I've been golden.

Any symbol, number, or whatever is allowed in the narrative.