Opinion of the Court
judgment of the Fifth Circuit and asks us to hold that a new $10,000 penalty attaches to each account not timely or accurately disclosed within a report.
A
To resolve who has the better reading of the law, we begin with the terms of the most immediately relevant statutory provisions, 31 U. S. C. §5314 and §5321. The first delineates an individual’s legal duties under the BSA, the second outlines the penalties that follow for failing to discharge those duties.
Section 5314 provides that the Secretary of the Treasury “shall” require certain persons to “keep records, file reports, or keep records and file reports” when they “mak[e] a transaction or maintai[n] a relation” with a “foreign financial agency.” §5314(a). When it comes to the duty to file reports, the relevant duty in our case, the statute says that reports “shall contain” information about “the identity and address of participants in a transaction or relationship,” “the legal capacity in which a participant is acting,” and “the identity of real parties in interest,” along with a “description of the transaction.” §§5314(a)(1)–(4). The law also directs the Secretary to prescribe “the way and … the extent” to which reports must be filed. §5314(a).
Immediately, one thing becomes clear. Section 5314 does not speak of accounts or their number. The word “account” does not even appear. Instead, the relevant legal duty is the duty to file reports. Of course, those reports must include various kinds of information about an individual’s foreign “transaction[s] or relationship[s].” But whether a report is filed late, whether a timely report contains one mistake about the “address of [the] participants in a transaction,” or whether a report includes multiple willful errors in its “description of … transaction[s],” the duty to supply a compliant report is violated. Put another way, the statutory obligation is binary. Either one files a report “in the
