Bank Of America (BAC): A Very Small Fine For A Very Big Mistake

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

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Bank of America (BAC) got off with a $33 million fine “to settle charges that it made false and misleading statements” about bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch employees. The case what brought by the SEC.

Bank of America had said in filings that Merrill had agreed not to pay out bonuses until January 31, 2009, unless the bank gave specific permission to Merrill to do so. As it turned out, BAC had given permission to the brokerage to pay $3.6 billion in incentive compensation for 2008, after leaving the impression that the permission had not already been granted.

The fine seems small given the amount of shareholder money that went to employees at Merrill for performance in a year in which the company almost went out of business.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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