Formal agreements with five banks for “unsafe or unsound practices” were reached by the national bank regulator in October, so far, the agency said in a Thursday release.
The five actions included the agreement reached Oct. 10 with TD Bank NA of Wilmington, Del., for deficiencies in the banks’ Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-money laundering (BSA/AML) compliance program, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said. The assessed civil money penalty by OCC was $450 million, part of a total $1.8 billion of fines assessed by federal banking regulators.
The other formal agreements were with:
- Axiom Bank, N.A., Maitland, Fla., for unsafe or unsound practices, including those related to that bank’s BSA/AML compliance program and violations of rules related to internal controls and its BSA officer.
- First National Bank of Dennison, Dennison, Ohio, for unsafe or unsound practices, including those related to board and management oversight, credit underwriting, and credit administration.
- First National Bank of Lake Jackson, Lake Jackson, Texas, for unsafe or unsound practices, including those related to strategic and capital planning, liquidity risk management, and interest rate risk management.
- The First National Bank of Waverly, Waverly, Ohio, for unsafe or unsound practices, including those relating to strategic planning, capital planning, and liquidity risk management.
The agency also announced several prohibitions against former bank employees, barring them from future service in a federally insured financial institution. Those included actions taken against:
- Tanya Jazmin Cortez, former teller and concierge at Los Angeles County, Calif., branches of Citibank, N.A., Sioux Falls, S.D., for selling confidential bank customer information to a third party, resulting in check fraud and a loss to the bank of approximately $348,000.
- Leronne D. Kornegay, former associate banker at a Brooklyn, N.Y., branch of JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., Columbus, Ohio, for engaging in a scheme to steal bank funds and falsely reporting the receipt of counterfeit bills in the bank’s general ledger. The OCC said the bank suffered a loss of at least $201,000.
- Lexus Inez Lewis, former fraud operations specialist, at a Jacksonville, Fla., branch of Citibank, N.A., resolving the “notice of charges,” in which the OCC alleged that Lewis made false representations in her employment application and became employed at the bank in violation of federal law; caused fraudulent transactions totaling at least $389,000 to incur on bank customers’ credit card accounts; and kept bank equipment without authorization. Lewis consented to the order without admitting or denying the allegations in the notice, the agency said.