WASHINGTON — Most all of the FinCEN BSA guidance has dealt with single institutions, leaving shared branches to cobble their policies to comply with the spirit and intent of the law and regulations, attorneys are saying.

“Shared branches have some unique challenges in that they have to deal with multiple institutions,” Wolters Kluwer Senior Attorney Ted Dreyer observed. Naturally, that might lead to some confusion about FEINs and filer names, he said.

From June 2004 through March 2007, FinCEN found just 121 SARs with narrative references to credit union shared branches and just 23 of those came from the shared branches themselves. According to the report, the 23 filed by shared branches used 16 different filer name variations, 10 different filer FEINs, and 17 different combinations of FEINs and filer names. Other errors were discovered in 15 of the 23.

CUSC President Carroll Beach explained that his Michigan branches recently underwent an audit to ensure BSA compliance and so far the results have come back positively. He also met with FinCEN a little over a year ago, and while they offered no shared branching specific guidance, “We had the impression that what we were doing was right.”