Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC has agreed to pay $1.45 million to settle claims from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) regarding the inaccurate reporting of billions of stock market trades, according to a filing made public by FINRA today.
Between June 2020 and June 2023, FINRA claims that Goldman Sachs inaccurately reported data for 36.6 billion equity orders to the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), a central repository used for market surveillance.
“CAT data is an integral part of FINRA’s automated market surveillance program,” the agreement states. “Inaccurate, incomplete, or untimely transaction and order reporting can negatively affect the regulatory audit trail and the quality of FINRA’s surveillance patterns, as well as FINRA’s ability to accurately reconstruct market events.”
FINRA highlighted that the errors were due to “inadvertent coding errors” on Goldman’s part, which led to some data fields being incorrectly filled out. The firm identified and corrected the errors, according to the regulatory body.
Additionally, FINRA imposed supervisory violations on Goldman Sachs for its failure to detect the reporting issues sooner. The financial firm also faced allegations of inaccurately reporting millions of orders submitted to Investors’ Exchange LLC (IEX) in 2021.
Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay $1.35 million to FINRA and an additional $95,000 to IEX to resolve these violations.
While Goldman Sachs neither admitted nor denied the allegations in the settlement, a company spokesperson declined to provide further comment.
This settlement underscores FINRA’s commitment to maintaining the integrity of market surveillance through accurate and timely data reporting.
