I recently took over as BSA officer and I am trying to clean out some files left by the previous officer. We have YEARS worth of records for all of our MSB accounts and I would really like to downsize, however, I don't want to dispose of anything the auditors need.
We review statements every year, we do an annual visit to the place of business, we review statements for DOEP every 6 months. As you can imagine one months worth of statements for each of those accounts is a pretty hefty stack of paper. Does anyone know how long to keep these? Or if it is acceptable to keep the typed review and not the actual copies of all the statements?

Unless something has a specific permanent timeframe requirement, anything related to BSA is retained for five years here.

HereToLearn - with regards to the copies of statements, are you guys putting some type of handwritten notes on these statements that you're wanting to keep for some purpose?
Can these statements be printed in the future if an auditor wanted to review something his/herself?

I'd keep detailed notes of my reviews, but I don't think I'd keep copies of statements that could easily be generated another time.

Another thought to save the trees... could you "print to PDF" instead of to your printer & save the file in a "review folder" on your bank's system? The review can be done by looking at the computer instead of the physical hard copy.

Just some thoughts...Welcome to BSA!

SUSA-
We are not writing any notes on the actual statement, I take notes as I go and use those to type my official review. Statements could be reprinted, but it would be a hassle on our part to reprint the statements if the auditors were to need them. There are certain files we do give the auditors access to through our system. I will certainly ask if a PDF statement form would be ok! Thanks for the advice

Just an FYI - we used to do the same thing. I asked our examiner if I needed to be printing all of the documentation (it was taking almost as long to print as it was to do the review). He indicated that they likely would never ask to see the supporting documentation, so he thought it was a waste of time. As long as we documented what we looked at and could retrieve it, he said that would be fine.