In an article in the Tuesday Wall Street Journal (WSJ), entitled “More foreign banks probed for sanctions violations”, Brett Wolf reported that the New York County District Attorney’s Office will shortly announce additional enforcement actions against banks for sanctions violations regarding Iran and Syria. In a speech made on November 14, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance talked about payments made to persons associated with sanctioned countries as constituting a threat “to US national security.”

This reminded me of the ideas that my “This Week in FCPA” colleague Howard Sklar often speaks about; that being ‘compliance convergence.’ One of these areas where there is convergence with anti-corruption and anti-bribery compliance programs is anti-money laundering. While many persons discuss the techniques used in anti-money laundering as techniques which can or should be used in banking and other financial institutions’ compliance programs, there is one area which companies should adopt from anti-money laundering directly into their anti-corruption and anti-bribery compliance programs and that is transaction monitoring.