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Legal counsel for business owners, investors and families with international income, accounts and assets.

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A message arrives through the bank's portal, or a relationship manager calls. The bank wants to know where the money came from, what your business actually does, who owns your company, or why a transfer arrived from another country. There is a deadline, usually a short one, and almost no explanation.

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Most clients treat this as an administrative nuisance. They answer quickly, attach whatever documents are closest to hand, and move on. That is often the moment a manageable situation becomes a difficult one. A bank review may be the first time anyone has looked at your cross-border financial history as a whole: tax returns from different countries, foreign bank statements, immigration filings, and the answers you gave the bank when you opened the account. These records often describe the same activity in different ways. Some differences are easy to explain. Gross receipts are not profit, and a new company may continue an older business. Others reveal a reporting gap or a sanctions question that needs separate legal work.

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Every engagement therefore has two tasks. The first is to answer the bank accurately, completely and on time. The second is to determine whether your records reveal a separate problem, and to address it before someone else identifies it. A bank extension gives you time for the first task only. It does not pause any IRS, FinCEN or OFAC deadline, and it does not preserve access to a voluntary disclosure procedure.

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Kutuzov & Associates, P.C. handles banking, tax and sanctions questions together, so that a response prepared for one purpose accounts for its consequences in the others.

 

WHY U.S. BANKS ASK QUESTIONS

U.S. banks operate under the Bank Secrecy Act and FinCEN's customer due diligence rules. These rules require a bank to understand the nature and purpose of each relationship, build a customer risk profile, and monitor activity against that profile. Automated monitoring and sanctions screening generate alerts. An analyst reviews each alert and may ask the relationship manager to obtain more information from you. The person who contacts you often does not know what triggered the request and may not be permitted to say.
 

A routine periodic review and an escalated event-driven review can arrive in identical language. Two points follow.

• The fact that a bank processed similar transfers for years does not mean it approved them. A payment that reached your account still requires its own legal assessment.

• A question asked today does not mean the bank has reached any conclusion.
   

The standard for a suspicious activity report is suspicion, not proof. A documented explanation gives the bank something to weigh. Silence, or an answer that conflicts with what the bank observes, leaves it with activity it cannot explain.