Jan 15 (Reuters) - Credit card firm Capital One Financial Corp has been fined $390 million for engaging in what the U.S. government called willful and negligent violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money laundering law, a Treasury Department bureau said on Friday.

The Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said in a statement that Capital One admitted to willfully failing to implement and maintain an effective program to guard against money laundering as required by law. (https://bit.ly/3qmXFji)

FinCEN said the financial services company admitted that it failed to file "thousands of suspicious activity reports" and "thousands of Currency Transaction Reports" with respect to a business unit known as the Check Cashing Group.

"The failures outlined in this enforcement action are egregious," FinCEN Director Kenneth Blanco said in a statement.

The violations occurred from at least 2008 through 2014, and caused millions of dollars in suspicious transactions to go unreported in a timely and accurate manner, FinCEN added. (Reporting by Arundhati Sarkar in Bengaluru; Editing by Will Dunham)