[natcombs]

> Firm Will Pay a Total of $38 Million in Penalties to Settle With Regulators

$38 million!?!? That's a expensive mistake for not submitting some paperwork that should be automated.

I'd like to see a list of international government agencies and what they can/do charge for penalty fines. I suspect that the United States SEC sets a high bar compared to some of the smaller fines I've seen elsewhere. GDPR appears to be one of the top contenders

https://www.tessian.com/blog/biggest-gdpr-fines-2020/

[JumpCrisscross]

> paperwork that should be automated

It’s very difficult to automate SARs. In part due to them requiring a compliance officer personally signing off on their validity.

[bostik]

At least you should have in-house automation flagging potential SAR cases. Then have compliance staff review those and escalate the valid ones.

We have a setup like that in place, and we're a gambling operation. A broker-dealer handling far larger sums of money really has no excuse.

[awinder]

They has 1.2B in operating income in each of 2018 & 2019, they’ll be okay ;-). This does appear to be a larger than avg settlement though.

[dclusin]

Yeah. I feel like putting a rule that if an account trade volume exeeeds 1% of average daily volume for a stock then submit the report wouldn't be too hard. Could be done offline during trade settlement. I'm wondering if there's more rigid requirements about when to submit them.

[epa]

the US Patriot act / FINRA was created as a job creation measure. It is essentially an indirect tax on banks to increase jobs after the stock market crash of 2001 ("compliance").

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

That is pretty cynical view of it and it has certainly been a side effect ( along with creation of 'list' cottage industry ), but I would argue that it was not its purpose.