SEC Charges Wells Fargo Advisors With Anti-Money Laundering Failures

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it has charged against Wells Fargo Advisors for failing to file at least 34 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) in a timely manner between April 2017 and October 2021. Wells Fargo Advisors, the St. Louis-based broker-dealer, has agreed to pay $7 million to settle the charges.

According to the commission, Wells Fargo Advisors did not timely file at least 25 SARs related to suspicious transactions in its customers' brokerage accounts involving wire transfers to or from foreign countries that it determined to be at a high or moderate risk for money laundering, terrorist financing, or other illegal money movements. The order also found that, beginning in April 2017, Wells Fargo Advisors failed to timely file at least nine additional SARs due to a failure to appropriately process wire transfer data into its AML transaction monitoring system in certain other situations.     

"When SEC registrants like Wells Fargo Advisors fail to comply with their AML obligations, they put the investing public at risk because they deprive regulators of timely information about possible money laundering, terrorist financing, or other illegal money movements,"said Gurbir S. Grewal, Director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement."Through this enforcement action, we are not only holding Wells Fargo Advisors accountable, but also sending a loud and clear message to other registrants that AML obligations are sacrosanct."  

Broker-dealers are required by the Bank Secrecy Act and regulations promulgated by the U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to file SARs for transactions they suspect involve fraud or a lack of an apparent lawful business purpose.

This is the second Bank Secrecy Act action against Wells Fargo Advisors in the last five years. In November 2017, the SEC issued a settled order against Wells Fargo Advisors for failing to timely file at least 50 SARs.