The government may reveal the existence of a SAR ‘in performance of their official duties’ - which for the OIG (and SEC, FinCEN, et al) would mean disclosure during an investigation.
The OIG wouldn’t even have to reveal the content of the report. If a report had been filed by one or more banks, the name of the filing bank wouldn’t necessarily have to be revealed.
The OIG would have said merely stated in their report that SAR’s were filed as part of their post-mortem on how Madoff evaded SEC investigation, because a SAR being filed would have been a big red flag that should not have been ignored by the OCC, FBI or Federal Reserve. The OIG revealed plenty of other confidential information in their report, in semi-redacted manner for the public report, laying out the breadth and scope of the information that the government had on Madoff and yet chose to ignore.
Remember, we’re talking of billions of dollars here.
That the OIG report is silent on the issue means to me that the bankers went along with this scam - and why wouldn’t they? Their bread was being buttered with the very best butter.
Well, remember that a SAR under the AML laws is basically a computer implementation of Fed regulations that automatically generates the SARs. Presumably, they are reviewed by someone before being filed, but this would typically be a low-level DDA account auditor/security enforcer.
It is possible that he saw the who the account was, asked his boss, and go told “it’s OK” based on the presumed nature of Madoff’s business. But no banker would dare risk suppressing these reports for business reasons. The banks usually have rules prohibiting even talking to the customer’s relationship manager about such matters.