Citi fined by SEC over incomplete "blue sheet" data

Citi fined by SEC over incomplete "blue sheet" data

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US securities watchdog SEC has fined Citigroup Global Markets $7m after the firm admitted providing incomplete “blue sheet” information about trades it executed.

According to officials in Washington D.C, a coding error occurred in the software that Citi used from May 1999 to April 2014 to process SEC requests for information.

Time of trades, types of trades, volume traded, prices, and other customer identifying information were all affected. 

During that 15-year period, Citi omitted 26,810 securities transactions from its responses to more than 2,300 blue sheet requests. 

After discovering the coding error, an SEC statement said the bank failed to report the incident or take any steps to produce the omitted data until nine months later.

“Broker-dealers have a core responsibility to promptly provide the SEC with accurate and complete trading data for us to analyze during enforcement investigations,” said Robert A. Cohen, co-chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Market Abuse Unit. 

“Citigroup did not live up to that responsibility for an inexcusably long period of time, and it must pay the largest penalty to date for blue sheet violations.”

Responding to a request for comment, a Citi spokesperson said: “We are pleased to have resolved this matter.”


Blue sheets are requests for information sent out by the SEC to market makers, brokers and clearinghouses.

The regulator can ask for specific securities or transactions to determine if there has been any illegal activity or to determine why a certain security experienced a large level of volatility.

Other SEC cases involving failures to provide complete blue sheet data include Credit Suisse Securities (USA) paid a $4.25m penalty in September 2015.

The unit of the Swiss bank admitted that technological and human errors resulted in the omission of more than 553,400 reportable trades from blue sheet responses to the SEC for more than two years.

Scottrade also paid a penalty, $2.5m, in January 2014, admitting that a computer coding error resulted in the omission of trades from blue sheet responses to the SEC for more than six years. 

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