I have received conflicting information from FinCEN and was hoping to get some advice. In a recent internal review we discovered errors on a customer's CTR. Going back further, we found that these errors have been on all CTR's filed on the customer for the past year. I called FinCEN and explained the situation to them and they told me to go ahead and file amendments since it was only about 20 CTR's.

Then, while going through the CTR's to amend them, I found 4 that should never have been filed because aggregated totals were not actually over $10K. I was leaning toward not correcting these because if I corrected the entire CTR, the amount wouldn't be over $10K, but I wanted to be sure so I called FinCEN again and explained the situation again.

This time, the person I talked to said I CAN'T amend ANY of the CTR's without completing a Backfiling Checklist and waiting 6-9 months for their response. So now I have all of the amended CTR's ready to send but I am not sure what to do. They did say I would not correct the CTR's that shouldn't have been filed.

Advice??? Thanks in advance!

Amending and back filing are two different things to me. Back filing would mean filing CTRs after the fact - say an internal review shows CTR's that were missed you would back file the missed reports. Amending to me would be correcting information that was incorrectly reported. Unfortunately, if you were to call FinCen a third time, you may receive a third opinion that is different from the first two.

To me, it would make more sense to amend all of the CTRs, even the ones that were incorrectly aggregated to change the amount to the correct amount, even if it is below the reporting threshold; however, I do not work for FinCen.

If you ask for a backfiring determination the form they will fax or e-mail you is the "Currency Transaction Reporting Backfiling or Amendment Checklist." (The form is unnumbered, unpublished, and my copy is May, 2012). If you made the same error on many reports on the same customer; e.g. the TIN was off by one digit, a "backfiling determination" would be appropriate. If you made a variety of different errors on the same customer it would not.

In choosing between the two alternatives it appears that FinCEN gave you, I would consider the fact that the regulators generally consider backfiling determinations as "you found it, you fixed it" and do not criticize the bank as a result. Filing 16 unsupervised corrections doesn't merit the same analysis.

In the subject line you mentioned "amending CTR's for the past year." I assume that means the errors began a year ago. If they began before that you would go back to the date where they began. There is no guidance that says you would only have to go back a year in filing corrections.

As for those you filed below the threshold, there is actually a mechanism for deleting reports from the system. It would be more appropriate than amending them. Personally, I would not know how to get the system to accept a CTR for an amount of less than $10K... That would include an amendment.

There was a relevant thread on deleting CTRs in this forum in recent months, but I cannot locate it in the time I have available.