My department (BSA) reviews certain legal processing documents for suspicious activity (summons, subpoenas, and warrants). The document copies are provided by Deposit Ops (they are the collection point). Are there any others we should be looking at? We're wondering if we should be looking at executions, garnishments, tax levies and such.

I came from a very small bank so the BSA officer was also the person who received all the legal processing; we didn't receive many at all.

When you say you look at 'certain' documents, what qualifies them for your review? I think you should consider which of those documents present the highest risk for your institution and which ones are most worthy of your time reviewing. Consider what other departments already do with some of those, such as garnishments, and whether or not it's worth any additional effort for you to review account activity for those.

You have to consider the nature of the legal process to decide if you need to review the account for potential suspicious activity - otherwise you're just chasing wild geese each time you get anything.

For example - if you receive a levy that is executing a judgement from a civil case, or a garnishment for civil matters. your money laundering risk is small and most likely a review of the account is not going to reveal anything. Examples of this would be civil cases for breach of contract, liability for injury, divorce, etc. Likewise, a levy for child support is not a trigger for money laundering issues.

If you want to be conservative, you can do a review of the last 12 months of activity to see if anything unusual stands out (like lots of cash or wires or unauthorized ACH returns) but digging through each and every transaction is most likely going to be a waste of resources.

However, if you receive a criminal subpoena, or a Grand Jury subpoena, or an IRS investigation, then you will want to take a closer look to see if the customer has been layering transactions, or doing an unusual movement of funds to avoid detection, etc. You will want to look at cash, wires, ACH (especially returns), and counter-parties to significant transactions (either in terms of dollar amount or number of transactions).

I would agree with PR. From a ML perspective, you should be focusing your efforts on Grand Jury subpoenas, NSL's and IRS investigations.

IRS summons are a good addition... They are not used in garden variety tax disputes, but under circumstances where the IRS is about to drop the hammer on someone. The "other" department that should be alerted to IRS summons is the lending area...

For those who doubt the value of any of these items triggering enhanced due diligence, think: "Amsouth," the original poster child for failing to file SARs. From page 3 of the Consent Order:

For example, the Legal department had no system in place to alert Bank Secrecy Act compliance personnel to subpoenas and information requests it received from law enforcement. In certain other cases, it did not provide information to the Bank Secrecy Act compliance or Corporate Security personnel about suspicious activity and reports generated from it, which was used only to monitor and manage litigated cases.

Thanks!