U.S. Securities industry regulator The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced that it has fined the Barclays Capital Inc. unit of UK based banking giant Barclays PLC (ADR) (NYSE:BCS) $1.3 million for systemic Order Audit Trail System (OATS) reporting violations and related supervisory failures.
FINRA rules require firms to transmit to OATS complete and accurate data relating to events in the lifecycle of an order, called Reportable Order Events (ROEs). FINRA found 15 system issues at Barclays Capital that gave rise to OATS reporting violations.
Barclays Capital transmitted more than 3 billion inaccurate or incomplete ROEs to OATS, including omitted special handling codes; inaccurate timestamps, execution quantities and member type codes; and duplicate or erroneous reports. In addition, Barclays Capital failed to transmit millions of ROEs to OATS. FINRA also found that Barclays Capital’s supervisory system was not reasonably designed to achieve compliance with its OATS reporting obligations.
“When firms fail to transmit OATS data or transmit inaccurate or incomplete data to OATS, market integrity is compromised because potential violative conduct, including manipulative activity and customer harm, may be obscured,” said Thomas Gira, Executive Vice President and Head of Market Regulation at FINRA. “OATS data is essential to FINRA’s automated equities surveillance program and is therefore critical to investor protection.”
In concluding this settlement, Barclays Capital neither admitted nor denied the charges, but consented to the entry of FINRA’s findings.