April 5, 2016
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) today announced a $1 million civil money penalty against Sparks Nugget, Inc. d/b/a John Ascuaga’s Nugget, of Sparks, Nevada. Sparks Nugget admitted that it willfully violated the anti-money laundering (AML) provisions of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). Casinos are required to implement and maintain an effective AML program; to maintain records of certain transactions; and to file reports relating to transactions in currency and suspicious transactions. These reports are valuable to law enforcement investigators seeking to follow money trails in order to anticipate or solve crimes. Sparks Nugget egregiously and willfully violated AML program requirements, reporting obligations, and recordkeeping requirements.
Sparks disregarded its compliance manager. It chose not to file rightfully prepared Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) and it instructed her to not interact with the Internal Revenue Service’s BSA auditors and prevented her from reviewing a copy of the completed exam report.
Sparks Nugget also committed hundreds of recordkeeping violations, and failed to report several Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) as well as SARs. The management committee Sparks Nugget established to determine whether to file SARs never held a single meeting, and some committee members were unaware that they were even on the committee. Sparks Nugget lacked any mechanism to document or otherwise account for decisions not to file SARs, and its day-to-day managers maintained that no suspicious activity ever transpired in the millions of dollars of transactions that occurred at the casino.