Subject:
Reporting, Recordkeeping, and Disclosure
Requirements
§103.22 (b) Transactions of
exempt persons,
(3) Initial Designation of
exempt person & (5) biennial filing with respect
to certain exempt persons.
These portions of the Bank
Secrecy Act require a bank to submit a report of
Designation of Exempt person both at the time of
initial filing and bienially for Phase II
customers that we have elected to designate as
exempt from reporting requirements. My comment
relates to the lack of availability of information
sharing between the Department of the Treasury and
the banks who have filed designations.
I took over as our bank's BSA
Officer in September of 2004. The previous person
responsible for BSA had since left the bank. Upon
reviewing the file that contained records of all
prior designations, I was never certain that I had
all the forms that evidenced the bank had renewed
designations by the timing guidelines. I assumed
they were filed since it was not mentioned during
a BSA examination but there should be an effective
and efficient way for a bank to obtain information
on designations that have been filed. A process
should be developed that would allow a bank to
request the name of the customer exempted, the
date of either the initial designation or the date
of the most recent biennial refiling, and the
reason for designating the customer as exempt.
Examiners have access to this
information before they come in to conduct an
exam. There is an element of surprise when they
have access to something that I, myself cannot
obtain. This is disconcerning because as the new
BSA officer it is not for lack of trying to comply
with any provision of the Bank Secrecy Act, it is
simply that I may not know what a previous
employee has filed and I want to be able to obtain
that information. This relationship should work
both ways to facilitate communication between the
Department of the Treasury and the banks. I
realize that myself and my bank could be held
liable for the actions of a previous employee
whose recordkeeping left a little to be desired.
I have heard similar stories
from other BSA officers where they have been
assigned the position because someone has quit,
passed away, or simply because someone has been
moved to another department within the bank. We
are left at the mercy to deal with the paperwork
we inherit. We also know that recordkeeping is a
very important part of BSA and we are all trying
to comply...but we are not able to update our
records since we don't have access to this
information. Our bank is part of a holding
company. A bank within our holding company was
cited in a BSA exam for not refiling a Phase II
designation in a timely manner on one customer and
not filing an initial designation on another
customer. In this situation the previous BSA
officer had passed away and they only had the
records she had maintained. In this instance the
new BSA officer was under the impression that the
proper paperwork had been filed but could not
evidence that because she could not get copies of
the filings. This lead to a violation
and extensive backfiling.
We need to make a change. If
bank's want to improve upon their bank's
recordkeeping and work to ensure all forms have
been filed accurately and on time then there
should be an agency willing to work with those of
us who are requesting this information to try and
comply with the recordkeeping requirements and to
ensure that we are all on the same playing field.
The examiners should not be the only ones with the
ability to access the information that WE
provided, we should have access to our own
information.
