Goldman Sachs fined $513K by FINRA over faulty surveillance reports

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) fined Goldman Sachs $512,500 for allegedly failing to properly surveil certain types of securities for potential manipulative trading activity for more than a decade.

In its decision notice published Tuesday, FINRA said the firm did not include warrants, rights, units, and certain over-the-counter (OTC) equity securities in nine automated surveillance reports from February 2009 to April 2023. Securities were excluded from the reports for two to 12-plus years, the self-regulatory organization said. Among the surveillance reports that excluded these securities were reports on wash trading and marking the open and close of trades, per the notice.

About 5,000 alerts were affected by the oversight, FINRA said. The omissions were discovered during cross-market surveillance conducted by the organization.