CBA plea to roll charges into one

THE Commonwealth Bank has suggested that 53,000 alleged breaches of money laundering laws listed in a case brought against it by regulators could be treated as a single matter because they all stemmed from the same IT error.

Following the launch of civil proceedings against CBA by the Federal Government’s financial intelligence unit AUSTRAC last Thursday, the bank yesterday outlined a soft- ware problem it said was the cause of more than 53,000 transactions not being flagged to authorities as required.

As CBA boss Ian Narev gave media interviews on Sunday and yesterday warning against jumping to conclusions, the bank’s share price yesterday rose almost 1 per cent to $81.52, recovering some of the heavy falls suffered on Friday.

“I understand there is very little goodwill for banks in general, and for CBA in particular, so when something like this happens people jump to con- clusions,” Mr Narev said.

Austrac alleges CBA failed to provide on-time reports of 53,506 cash transactions of $10,000 or more and totalling $625 million that were made through the bank’s new Intelligent Deposit Machines (IDMs) from November 2012 to September 2015.

Yesterday CBA said a coding error, which occurred following a software update to its IDMs in late 2012, was responsible for the required Threshold Transaction Reports (TTRs) not being generated.

CBA said the fault was fixed within a month of it being discovered in 2015. “The vast majority of the reporting failures alleged in the statement of claim relate specifically to this coding error,” CBA said, although it recognised that the Austrac case includes other serious allegations unrelated to the TTRs.

The bank could face a maximum penalty of $18 million for each of the 53,700 contraventions, if found guilty.

CBA is due to release its full-year results tomorrow and is expected to report another record profit.