A Teamsters pension fund alleges that Bank of America overstated its progress under a regulatory order before Treasury announced more than $1.21 billion in penalties and settlements. The fund seeks damages for investors who bought or otherwise acquired shares from August 1, 2025, through October 13, 2026.
Treasury said Bank of America, N.A. failed to timely report over $5 billion in suspicious transactions; a Teamsters pension fund now seeks investor damages from its parent and two executives. The department said the bank “prioritized its revenues” while suspicious activity accumulated without investigation. On October 16, the New England Teamsters Pension Fund sued Bank of America Corporation, CEO Brian Moynihan and CFO Alastair Borthwick, alleging they misled shareholders about progress on the bank’s financial crime controls. The complaint says shares fell 4.8% after Treasury announced more than $1.21 billion in penalties and settlements and the company disclosed the charge in its quarterly results. The live fight is whether the parent company’s own statements about progress under its subsidiary’s regulatory order inflated what investors paid for its stock.
In a statement reported by the trade publication *Global Trade Review*, Bank of America said it had invested billions of dollars in technology and assigned thousands of employees to financial crime work. It said its team was far along in addressing regulators’ concerns. Treasury’s release says the bank “failed to take meaningful action even in the face of testing that highlighted significant problems.”
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The complaint challenges Bank of America Corporation’s disclosures about the scope, cost and remediation of its subsidiary’s compliance failures, including its statement that it had “already completed significant steps to satisfy requirements of the Consent Order.” The order came from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in December 2024, was issued to the company’s national bank subsidiary, Bank of America, N.A., and required corrective work on the bank’s anti-money laundering and sanctions programs.
According to the complaint filed in the Southern District of New York, Bank of America repeated the progress statement in disclosures to investors. Its second-quarter 2026 filing acknowledged that resolving the order or other regulatory inquiries might require monetary penalties, but still said significant steps had been completed. The pension fund alleges that this account was misleading because serious gaps remained in transaction monitoring and investigations. (New York verdicts.)
That is the move Labaton Keller Sucharow, the fund’s counsel, has put before the court. The complaint seeks damages on the theory that investors bought Bank of America shares at prices inflated by misleading statements, then lost money when the scale and cost of the problems became public. It proposes a class of buyers who acquired common stock from August 1, 2025, through October 13, 2026. Those claims against Bank of America Corporation and its executives remain allegations.
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Treasury’s October 13 enforcement announcement set out the penalties that preceded the suit. FinCEN assessed $1.2 billion, and as part of that resolution the bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act. Treasury said more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions had not been timely reported, including over $1 billion involving priority illicit finance or national security risks. The agency said the bank had relied in part on law enforcement inquiries and other outside interventions to identify activity its own controls should have detected.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency assessed a $750 million penalty, the largest in its history. The complaint says FinCEN’s $1.2 billion assessment includes credit for the OCC’s $750 million penalty, so those figures should not be added together. The Office of Foreign Assets Control separately announced an $11.6 million settlement over 475 apparent sanctions violations. Together, Treasury put the penalties and settlements at more than $1.21 billion.
The pension fund’s complaint says the regulatory settlement charge reduced diluted earnings per share by 17 cents. It alleges that, after the announcement and the bank’s quarterly results, shares closed on October 14 at $51.39, down 4.8% from the previous close. The fund uses that fall to support its claim of investor loss; it must still prove the statements were false and caused that loss.
The agency resolution and the shareholder suit ask different questions. Treasury addressed the bank’s financial crime controls and reporting. The pension fund alleges that Bank of America Corporation and its two senior executives misled investors about work still required of its bank subsidiary under the 2024 order. **Analysis:** this is an event-driven securities suit, the stock-drop claim that follows an enforcement settlement. For any company under a regulatory order, the resolved agency bill can sit beside a separate, unquantified demand for shareholder damages, and the company’s own description of its remediation progress becomes the plaintiff’s evidence.
The complaint requests a jury trial and damages, but it has not established securities fraud. The bank’s statement, as reported by *Global Trade Review*, describes substantial investment and continuing work. The next contest is over who speaks for the proposed investor class. A Hagens Berman investor notice, issued by a firm that is not counsel on the filed complaint, gives December 15, 2026, as the deadline to seek appointment as lead plaintiff. If the case proceeds, the court may address whether “significant steps” accurately described the bank subsidiary’s progress when investors read the parent’s disclosures.
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