Suspicious activity reportSAR

The confidential filing made when activity looks like financial crime.

When a bank sees activity that seems tied to money laundering, fraud, or another crime, it reports it privately to the authorities, and it cannot tell the customer.

A regulatory report submitted to the financial intelligence unit on detected suspicious activity, subject to non-disclosure. A financial intelligence unit (FIU) is the government body that receives and analyzes these reports, and in the US it is the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

A suspicious activity report (SAR) typically follows these steps:

1. Monitoring or a staff member flags activity that may be suspicious.
2. An analyst investigates the case and decides whether it meets the reporting standard.
3. The institution files a report that describes who, what, when, where, and why.
4. It keeps the report and its supporting records, and it does not tell the subject.

The filing has two defining features:

• Confidentiality, since the institution generally cannot tell the customer that a report was filed. This is often called a tipping-off restriction.
• Deadlines, since regulators set time limits for filing after detection. In the US, the usual limit is 30 calendar days from detecting the facts.

Suspicious activity reports go by different names in some countries, such as suspicious transaction reports.

A SAR sits next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Anti-money laundering (AML) is the program that includes SAR filing.
• Currency transaction report (CTR) is an automatic report on large cash transactions, which does not require suspicion.
• Money mule is a type of account whose activity often triggers a SAR.