U.S. Bank Cited by Federal Authorities for Lapses on Money Laundering<br />In a late-2009 memo, court documents show, U. S. Bank’s anti-money-laundering officer warned the chief compliance officer<br />that employees responsible for investigating the alerts were “stretched dangerously thin.”<br />But senior bank officials knew they should not be curtailing money-laundering inquiries just<br />because they did not have enough employees, so they hid the practice from federal bank examiners, according to prosecutors.<br />U. S. Bank, the fifth-largest commercial bank by assets in the United States, was charged by the federal authorities<br />on Thursday with failing to guard against illegal activity and, in at least one instance, even abetting it.<br />The action against U. S. Bank was modest compared with cases involving banking giants like HSBC and Standard Chartered<br />that the authorities found had done business with drug gangs and countries like Cuba and Iran that had been barred from the United States financial system under international sanctions.<br />One U. S. Bank employee left references to the staffing problem out of the minutes of internal<br />meetings, fearful of what regulators would think, the Justice Department said.<br />The Justice Department accused U. S. Bank, which is based in Minneapolis, of severely neglecting anti-money laundering rules, helping a payday lender operate an illegal business<br />and lying to a regulator about its plans for tracking potential criminal activity by bank customers.<br />Federal prosecutors in Manhattan reached an agreement with U. S. Bank to defer prosecution<br />as long as the bank could show it had improved its monitoring of customer transactions.
