who is required to file suspicious activity reports
Suspicious activity report In financial regulation, a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) or Suspicious Transaction Report (STR) is a report made by a financial institution about suspicious or potentially suspicious activity. The criteria to decide when a report must be made varies from country to country but generally is any financial transaction that does not make sense to the financial institution, is unusual for that particular client or appears to be done only for the purpose of hiding or obfuscating a transaction. The report is filed with that country's financial crime enforcement unit, which is typically a specialist agency designed to collect and analyse transactions and report these to relevant law enforcement units. Front line staff in the financial institution have the responsibility to identify transactions that may be suspicious and these are reported to a designated person that is responsible for the reporting the transaction. The financial institution is not allowed to inform the client or the parties to the transaction that a SAR has been lodged.
Auditor's report The auditor's report on the financial statements typically provides very limited details on the procedures and findings of the audit. In contrast, auditors provide much more detail to the board of directors or to the audit committee of the board. Beginning in 2002, many countries have tasked the audit committee with primary responsibility over the audit.[10] For example, in the United States, section 204 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in 2002[11] required auditors to communicate certain information to audit committees, which were required to be entirely independent, and also made the audit committee responsible for the auditor's hiring.[12] In August 2012, the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board finalized Auditing Standard No. 16,[13] which requires additional communications to the audit committee.[14]