Here is a fun one.

We are taking a loss on a check fraud situation. Bank learned of the loss potential in November and filed a police report. BSA was not notified until January that any of this occurred.

Which is the date of determination? I am leaning toward November as that is when the credit union had knowledge. I am not sure that we can use the excuse that no one told BSA as a reason list the date of determination as January.

If you have a subject and the dollar amount is above the filing trigger, the credit union had knowledge in November.

The 30 day clock starts ticking when the BSA Officer or similar determined the activity to be suspicious. That said, if your CU isn't reporting these things to the BSA Officer you have other issues that need to be addressed and you will be hard pressed by any good examiner for having such a sloppy program in place.

If you had suspicious activity in November you can't fall back on the verbiage listed by Rock. That verbiage is based on the idea that all potentially suspicious activity is being flagged for review. I would hope that this is an isolated incident and there are not other examples.

Rockchucker - so you are saying that the clock does not start clicking until the BSA officer is notified - I agree with ACBbank - never heard of that before. Knowledge is institutional knowledge - not when it is brought to the BSA Officer's attention. What this really is a sign of is that the credit union is failing two of the five BSA pillars, which is much more problematic than simply filing a SAR late.

I went back to see where I had learned about the 30 days from determination of suspicious and this is the document I used.

https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/sar_tti_14.pdf

It is from FinCEN so I have to think it is good to follow. I started at page 36.

The following examples illustrate that the date of initial detection does not necessarily occur on the date of the transaction(s), the date when an automated system generates a notice or red flag alert, or the date when an employee initially reviews the transaction(s).


While this is true - if they went as far as filing a police report in November - you cannot tell me that you can just ignore it for three months and then say - oh - hey - by the way BSA Officer - we had this occur three months ago and start the clock.

How about this? This is for a larger institution, and has so far passed years worth of audits and exams without an issue.

- All employees are trained to refer activity to BSA Officer
- BSA Officer and staff also use AML software to detect activity (noting that not all circumstances can be detected that way, such as, customer behavior or comments)
- BSA Officer chairs a SAR Committee that meets approx 2 times a month, or more often as needed
- We state in our BSA policy, which has Board approval, that no one person acting alone decisions activity as suspicious, instead it is the above Committee that is vested with that responsibility
- Our 30 day clock starts the date the committee decides if it is suspicious
- We try to never postpone or delay a decision; when we first see the case, we have to decide to file or nor and will file if in doubt

This does create situations like: activity on Jan 4th wasn't reviewed in time for the Jan 7th meeting. Next meeting is not till Jan 21st. If needed I would argue that we have until Feb 20th to file that SAR describing Jan 4th activity, even though a teller or branch manager may have noticed that activity on Jan 4th and referred it internally for a possible SAR.

But in practice, to avoid that argument being necessary, I'd move mountains to get that SAR filed by Feb 2nd anyway. Deciding it on Jan 21st and filing it by Feb 2nd is generally very manageable. Even filing on Feb 8th, I'm still pretty comfortable too. But in any event we're talking about a maximum of about 7 weeks, as opposed to OP's 3 month scenario. And I agree, if it's a matter of someone not bothering to tell BSA for 3 months, that's a big problem.

Of course not, that's why I mentioned in my original comment that they had other issues to address in their BSA program.

How does one file a Police Report without the BSA Department being involved?

Fraud departments and BSA departments that don't interact. I've audited my share of banks that are very siloed.