Bank of America’s Merrill wealth unit agrees to $7.5 million civil penalty over SAR reporting and recordkeeping failures

Bank of America’s wealth-management business, Merrill, has agreed to a $7.5 million civil penalty tied to alleged failures in suspicious-activity reporting and recordkeeping, according to a report published Monday by Yahoo Finance.

The regulator’s statement, as summarized in the post, focused on the broker-dealer’s obligations around SARs, or suspicious activity reports, which are filings financial firms make when they detect activity that may indicate money laundering, fraud, or other financial crimes. The regulator said Merrill did not meet its reporting and recordkeeping requirements.

The post characterizes the issue as a compliance lapse rather than a market-loss event, describing it as a failure to follow the rules governing when firms must submit SARs and how they must maintain supporting records. Those recordkeeping duties are designed so regulators can review the basis for any filings and confirm that the firm’s internal monitoring controls are operating as intended.

While the report states the parties reached an agreement and that the penalty is $7.5 million, it does not provide additional granular details in the information available here, such as the time period of the alleged shortcomings, the specific control failures cited by the regulator, or the scope of affected accounts.

Bank of America’s wealth unit operates through broker-dealers and investment-related subsidiaries, which are subject to extensive compliance expectations under U.S. financial-crime and broker-dealer rule frameworks. Regulators often treat SAR-related compliance as a high-priority area because SAR filings are a key part of how authorities identify suspicious patterns and investigate potential misconduct.

As of this writing, the post does not disclose whether Merrill also agreed to any specific remediation steps, enhanced controls, or independent oversight beyond the penalty. It similarly does not spell out what Merrill said in response or whether the firm disputed any factual findings, leaving the underlying conduct and corrective actions unclear from the published summary.

Market observers are likely to watch for follow-on disclosures from Bank of America or updates in any related regulatory order, including the duration of the compliance breakdown and what changes, if any, the firm will implement to prevent repeat reporting and recordkeeping failures. Additional filings, if released, could also indicate whether the matter points to broader operational issues across wealth and brokerage compliance functions.