British banking giant Barclays must pay $4 million to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for failing to correctly or timely report more than 5 million swap transactions between 2018 to 2023.
During that period, Barclays’ reporting failures included misreporting due to the use of a duplicate swap identifier; incorrect reporting of primary economic terms; misreported time stamps; errors in connection with continuation data reporting; and late reporting, the CFTC said, resulting in violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations.
“Over the last year, the CFTC has imposed over $60 million in penalties on six registered swap dealers, including Barclays here, in connection with swap data reporting violations,” Ian McGinley, the agency’s director of enforcement, said in a prepared statement. “This resolution, which also includes admissions, reflects the division’s ongoing commitment to ensure the costs of violating the law outweigh the costs of compliance.”
The CFTC fined BNY $5 million in August over swap reporting and supervision failures. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America were hit with larger fines — $30 million, $15 million and $8 million, respectively — in October 2023, also for swap reporting errors.
More than a decade after the Dodd-Frank Act was signed, it’s “well past time for swap dealers to ensure they are in full compliance with the CEA and CFTC regulations,” McGinley said last year. “As significant reporting failures continue to persist, our resolutions will reflect the gravity of swap dealers’ continuing failures to prioritize compliance and seek to deter future failures. And when appropriate, we will require a neutral third party to advise, assist with, and test the sufficiency of an entity’s remediation.”
Barclays’ “substantial cooperation” with the CFTC’s investigation included proactively flagging swap reporting issues and voluntarily providing information about the violations within the order, the agency said. The bank has made moves to remediate the issues, including by voluntarily engaging third-party vendors to review and validate its swap reporting processes, according to the CFTC.
The cooperation and remediation resulted in a reduced monetary penalty, the agency said.
Barclays did not immediately respond to a request for comment.