Big Wall Street Firms Fined $1.8-B For Lax Record-Keeping

Large Wall Street firms agreed to pay $1.8 billion in fines for failing to keep electronic records such as text messages between employees on their mobile phones, US authorities said Tuesday (Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022, in Manila), Agence France-Press (AFP) reported.

Photo Insert: Deutsche Bank was one of the firms that agreed to the fines.

Barclays, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs were among the firms that agreed to fines over "longstanding failures" to maintain and preserve electronic communications that must be available to regulators in the course of oversight, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said in a statement.

The SEC announced a total of $1.1 billion in fines on 16 institutions in all. The 16 firms listed included some companies such as Morgan Stanley with affiliated firms also covered by the agreement.

In a parallel action, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced it reached settlements totaling $710 million from the same group of financial institutions over the same offenses.

"Finance, ultimately, depends on trust. By failing to honor their recordkeeping and books-and-records obligations, the market participants we have charged today have failed to maintain that trust," SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said in a statement. "Since the 1930s, such recordkeeping has been vital to preserve market integrity.

"As technology changes, it's even more important that registrants appropriately conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels, and they must maintain and preserve those communications."

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