Toronto-Dominion has joined the dubious club of large companies that have paid a penalty of $1 billion or more in a single case of misconduct. It achieved that distinction with the recent slew of announcements by the U.S. Justice Department and several financial regulators that the book was being thrown at the Canadian bank’s U.S. subsidiary TD Bank for widespread failures in meeting its obligations to prevent the use of its operations for money laundering by criminals and tax evaders.
TD Bank was hit with $1.9 billion in criminal fines by the DOJ and more than a billion from the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. It all came to $3.09 billion in penalties. Adding these to Toronto-Dominion’s previous cases documented in Violation Tracker raises the bank’s aggregate penalties in the U.S. to nearly $4 billion, far and away the highest total for any parent company headquartered in Canada.
Looking specifically at penalties for anti-money-laundering (AML) deficiencies, Toronto-Dominion is now at the top of the list in that category, overtaking Denmark’s Danske Bank, which has hit with $2 billion in criminal fines by the DOJ in 2022.
Other banks with the highest penalties for AML and related Bank Secrecy Act violations include: JPMorgan Chase ($811 million), HSBC ($665 million), U.S. Bancorp ($528 million), Deutsche Bank ($491 million), and Capital One ($390 million). The non-bank with the largest total is Western Union at $740 million.
AML violations are not limited to the United States. In the new Violation Tracker Global, which covers cases against large corporations in 45 countries (including the U.S.), AML is one of the most frequent offenses, with total penalties equal to more than $20 billion imposed by regulators and courts in three dozen countries.
The U.S. by far contributes the most ($15 billion) to that total. Other countries with the most AML penalties against large corporations include Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, each with between $1 billion and $2 billion. Next are Denmark and Sweden with totals between $500 million and $700 million.
Outside the United States, the largest individual AML cases include: a $916 million penalty in Australia against Westpac Banking Corporation; a $900 million penalty in the Netherlands against ING Bank; a $675 million penalty in Denmark against Danske Bank; a $575 million penalty in the Netherlands against ABN AMRO; a $529 million penalty in Australia against Commonwealth Bank; a $397 million penalty in Sweden against Swedbank; and a $350 million penalty against NatWest in the United Kingdom.
Toronto-Dominion had one AML penalty outside the U.S.—a penalty equal to less than $7 million in its home country of Canada.
These figures suggest that large banks everywhere have a problem complying with AML restrictions. That is probably because doing business with clients flush with dubious cash is simply too lucrative for them to resist. Large penalties imposed in the U.S. and a few other countries may have some deterrent effect, but regulators and prosecutors need to find more effective forms of punishment.
Note: The new TD Bank cases will be added to Violation Tracker and Violation Tracker Global as part of updates that are being prepared.