CBA says ASIC not to take any enforcement action in connection with AUSTRAC matter
ASIC has concluded its investigation in relation to matters that were the subject of the proceedings commenced against CBA by AUSTRAC in August 2017.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has provided an update regarding the regulatory investigation related to the proceedings commenced against CBA by AUSTRAC on August 3, 2017.
CBA says it was notified on Wednesday that ASIC has concluded its investigation, and will not take any enforcement action, in relation to matters that were the subject of the proceedings launched by AUSTRAC in August 2017, including the Group’s disclosure of those matters and whether directors and officers of CBA complied with specific obligations under the Corporations Act.
Back in August 2017, Australia’s financial intelligence and regulatory agency, AUSTRAC, initiated civil penalty proceedings in the Federal Court against CBA for serious and systemic non-compliance with the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 (AML/CTF Act).
AUSTRAC’s action alleges over 53,700 contraventions of the AML/CTF Act:
- CBA did not comply with its own AML/CTF program, because it did not carry out any assessment of the money laundering and terrorism financing (ML/TF) risk of IDMs before their rollout in 2012. CBA took no steps to assess the ML/TF risk until mid-2015 – three years after they were introduced.
- For a period of three years, CBA did not comply with the requirements of its AML/CTF program relating to monitoring transactions on 778,370 accounts.
- CBA failed to give 53,506 threshold transaction reports (TTRs) to AUSTRAC on time for cash transactions of $10,000 or more through IDMs from November 2012 to September 2015.
- These late TTRs represent approximately 95 per cent of the threshold transactions that occurred through the bank’s IDMs from November 2012 to September 2015 and had a total value of around $624.7 million.
- AUSTRAC alleges that the bank failed to report suspicious matters either on time or at all involving transactions totalling over $77 million.
- Even after CBA became aware of suspected money laundering or structuring on CBA accounts, it did not monitor its customers to mitigate and manage ML/TF risk, including the ongoing ML/TF risks of doing business with those customers.
