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by Mike Caswell

TD Bank Group has agreed to pay $3.1-billion for violations of money-laundering laws in the United States. (All figures are in U.S. dollars.) The U.S. Department of Justice claims that the bank allowed itself to be an easy target for criminals, with international drug traffickers and others moving hundreds of millions of dollars through TD accounts. Those who used the bank included a man who dumped piles of cash on the bank's counters and a criminal organization that conspired with bank employees, authorities say.

The penalties for TD are contained in separate cases announced by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, on Thursday, Oct. 10. The bank has agreed to pay $1.3-billion to FinCEN and has agreed to pay $1.8-billion to the Department of Justice. The bank has also pleaded guilty to federal charges in New Jersey.

The penalties stem from violations of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act which, among other things, requires financial institutions to maintain a program to prevent money laundering. According to the DOJ, there were "staggering and pervasive failures in oversight" at TD, which involved its inability to monitor trillions of dollars in transactions. Authorities claim that the bank failed to meaningfully monitor transactions involving high-risk countries, instructed branches to stop filing internal unusual transaction reports on some suspicious customers and permitted more than $5-billion in activity in accounts even after the bank decided to close them.

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