VIDEO: SAR Timelines for Continuing Activity

In this Compliance Clip (video), Adam explores a key BSA/AML question that many financial institutions face: how to handle the timeline when suspicious activity continues after an initial SAR filing. Drawing on longstanding guidance and more recent clarification, Adam walks through how institutions should think about timing and the practical challenges that can arise. If you've ever wondered how the continuing activity timeline actually works in practice, this quick overview will point you in the right direction.

Video Transcript

The following is a transcript of this video.

This Compliance Clip is a BSA topic, and we're going to talk about the timeline for SAR continuing activity reviews. Again, this is a BSA/AML/CFT topic. The question we have here is: what is the timeline for a financial institution that elects to file SARs in accordance with FinCEN's continuing suspicious activity guidance?

What FinCEN has told us, dating all the way back to the year 2000, is that financial institutions have to have the option, when they have a bunch of suspicious activity occurring, rather than filing separate suspicious activity reports for each occurrence, they can clump it together and do so about quarterly. That’s guidance that's been around for a quarter of a century. It's been around for a long time, and so, here, this question seeks to clarify what the actual timelines are for a financial institution that elects to file Suspicious Activity Reports in accordance with FinCEN’s continuous suspicious activity guidance.

The answer to this actually comes from a group of frequently asked questions that were released by FinCEN in October of 2025. In that release, what they said was this, FinCEN guidance advises financial institutions to file suspicious activity reports for continuing activity after a 90-day period with the filing deadline being 120 calendar days after the date of the previously related suspicious activity report filing. They do clarify this by saying that financial institutions are not required to utilize the continuing activity opportunity and instead may file suspicious activity reports as appropriate in line with standard suspicious activity report and SAR timeframes.

Now, why would you file more SARs than necessary? Maybe a logistics thing, maybe a systems thing, but for the most part, most of us are going to be utilizing the SAR continuing activity filing guidelines.

Now, what I will say, as an auditor who has reviewed and reviews suspicious activity reports, one of the common errors that I see is financial institutions missing the date, and having untimely SAR filings because for the continuing activity, theymissed that 90-day window and they don't file appropriately.

It's a bit complicated, so let's take a look at what is listed in the Frequently Asked Questions to understand what this time frame is.

What they say is that for financial institutions that elect to file SARs in accordance with FinCEN's continuing suspicious activity guidance, below is a timeline, it's an example, in which a financial institution files a SAR with an identified subject and determines that suspicious activity has continued. Now, since they have an identified subject that's related to the first 30 days that we'll see in this example, if they didn't know this subject, that would be a different time period. So that's what they're saying here.

In this example, they say the day zero is when the detection of facts that may constitute a basis for a SAR filing occurs. And this is a whole debate in and of itself. I've probably done a video, I could do another video in the future about this, but that's day zero is the detection of facts that may constitute a basis for a filing of a SAR. That's your day zero. That's when your clock starts.

Then your initial SAR filing is due at day 30, right? So it's due at day 30. That's your initial SAR filing.

Now, after that initial SAR filing, let's talk about the dates for continuing activity. Day 120 is the ending of that 90-day period because day 30 was the initial SAR. So at 90 days, that's day 120. That's the end of your 90-day period. And then day 150, which is 120 days after initial filing is your filing deadline for the continuing activity SAR.

So this is how it works. Day zero, day 30, day 120, and day 50.

Now, the most common error that I've seen financial institutions make is they count months and not days. And if you're doing this, especially in the fourth quarter of the year, and you have maybe October 1st, and you think you've got 120 days to February 1st, because that's four months, well, it's not right because October has 31 days, December has 31 days, and so does January. So, February 1st is not 120 days, it's actually 123, I think, if I did the math properly. So, your filing deadline would be three days before that, which would be in late January. So, that's a common error.

So, don't count months, always count actual days. That is a little tip for you there.

They go on in this frequently asked question, and they say when a when filing a SAR for continued activity, the date or date range of suspicious activity, which is item 30 on the SAR form, should include the entire 90-day period starting on the date immediately following the filing of the initial SAR or the date following the end of the previous 90-day period. So, they give us that guidance there.

That's all I have for this Compliance Clip.