Citi Forgot to Fix its Money Laundering Systems

Money laundering.

In 2012, Citigroup Inc. got in trouble for not having good enough systems to prevent and report money laundering. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of Citi's regulators, ordered the bank to get its act together, in numbing detail. The 2012 consent order goes on for 22 pages and covers things like setting up a compliance committee, clarifying lines of responsibility for managing anti-money-laundering compliance, adopting new customer due diligence programs and suspicious-activity-reporting policies, and hiring a consultant to review past activity for reporting failures. Each item has a pretty comprehensive list of requirements for how Citi was supposed to implement it in order to satisfy the regulator.