Department of Treasury January 7, 2013 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The OCC, as part of its continuing effort to reduce paperwork and respondent burden, invites the general public and other Federal agencies to take this opportunity to comment on information collections, as required by the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, Public Law 104-13 (44 U.S.C. 3506(c)(2)(A)). The OCC is soliciting comments concerning the currently approved Minimum Security Devices and Procedures, Reports of Suspicious Activities, and Bank Secrecy Act Compliance Program information collection. The Minimum Security Devices and Procedures and Bank Secrecy Act Compliance Program portion of the information collection is being extended without change. The OCC is proposing to extend, with revision, the interagency suspicious activity report (SAR-DI) portion of the collection and is inviting comments on this revision. As the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) administrator, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in the U.S. Department of Treasury is changing from a system originally designed for collecting industry- specific paper forms to a modernized information technology environment centered on electronic reporting. Based on financial institution type, depository institutions, broker-dealers in securities, futures commission merchants and introducing brokers in commodities, insurance companies, mutual funds, money services businesses, and casinos file reports on four separate forms. FinCEN's new approach is to have one electronically filed interactive BSA SAR that will be used by all filing institutions to report suspicious activity as of April 1, 2013. There are no proposed changes to the suspicious activity report regulation. National banks and federal savings associations supervised by the OCC will continue to follow the regulation, interagency guidance, and filing instructions to determine when a report should be filed and what information should be included in the report. The interactive BSA SAR has several new data fields and introduces data fields from the SARs of other industries. On March 29, 2012, FinCEN released guidance titled, ``Filing FinCEN's New Currency Transaction Report and Suspicious Activity Report'' (FIN-2012-G002). The guidance notes that FinCEN is making available additional and more specific data elements (that is, characterizations of suspicious activity and types of financial services) as a more efficient way to bring information about suspicious activity to the attention of FinCEN and law enforcement. The guidance clarified the addition of new and expanded data elements does not create an expectation that financial institutions will revise internal programs, or develop new programs, to capture information that reflects the expanded data elements. Data elements designated as ``critical fields (questions for which an answer must be provided) in the BSA SAR are identified by the asterisk preceding the data element number.