Treasury Publishes 30-day Notice of Changes to FinCEN AML Reporting Form

June 5, 2025

The U.S. Department of the Treasury, on behalf of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued on June 5 a 30-day comment period to changes it made to its collection form real estate professionals will use to report information about certain residential real estate transfers under the anti-money laundering (AML) regulation.

There is now a 30-day comment period, which ends July 7.

FinCEN's AML rule for residential real estate transfers, which goes into effect Dec. 1, requires select real estate professionals to submit reports and keep records about certain high-risk, non-financed transfers of residential real property to specified legal entities and trusts.

FinCEN made several changes requested by ALTA in a comment letter submitted in January. The modifications of note include adding form logic that grays out fields based on selections and adding more common language to some instructions. However, FinCEN did not address ALTA’s request to add an “unable to collect” option.

In response to comments, FinCEN is providing a mechanism through which a reporting person can indicate that a person associated with a transferee is both a beneficial owner and a signing individual, without having to manually enter the same information twice. Through this change, FinCEN expects that the amount of time for reporting persons to complete the form will be incrementally reduced. 

Reporting

This version of the form still has 111 fields. FinCEN believes that “very rarely will a reporting person need to complete all 111 fields.

“In certain circumstances, reporting persons may need to complete as few as 40 fields,” according to FinCEN.

In addition, FinCEN retained the requirement that reports be submitted electronically through an online interface using the same free system that financial institutions and other filers use to submit required BSA reports (known as FinCEN's BSA E-Filing System).

To file through the BSA system, individual users will be required to create a login.gov account (if they do not already have one). Once enrollment is complete, the system will provide three options for filing reports:

  • Through an online form
  • Uploaded as a pdf
  • Through a user-developed automated interface using Secure File Transfer Protocol

The enrollment process for FinCEN's BSA E-Filing System entails identifying the reporting person and assigning a designated “Supervisory User.” The Supervisory User is an individual who will facilitate the process of creating general user accounts for the reporting person's other employees, if any, who may file reports. The Supervisory User has access to system functionality not available to regular users, such as the ability to update filing organization information and track the status of filings submitted by all users from across the organization.

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Contact ALTA at 202-296-3671 or [email protected].