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The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Treasury Department agency that regulates nationally chartered banks, on Friday announced the civil fine and order against Grant Thornton, which was signed by Comptroller John Dugan on Thursday.

Chicago-based Grant Thornton disputed the agency's findings and said it will challenge the sanction in a federal appeals court, a legal avenue that is available to the accounting firm.

The $300,000 fine, while small, was noteworthy in that is unusual for the comptroller's office to fine accounting firms.

In the order, Dugan said that Grant Thornton, in its audit of the Keystone bank's 1998 financial statements, ignored "unequivocal" written evidence that nearly one-quarter of the bank's assets could not be accounted for.

"The record shows that Grant Thornton recklessly participated in an unsafe or unsound practice with respect to its audit of Keystone," the order said.

In imposing the fine and order, which requires Grant Thornton to meet an array of conditions in its future audit work for federally insured banks, the comptroller's office rejected an August 2005 recommendation by an administrative law judge at the agency that the enforcement action be dismissed.

"We are disappointed that the OCC ignored the recommendations of its own administrative law judge," Grant Thornton said in a statement.

Regulators closed First National Bank of Keystone and seized its assets in September 1999 after finding what they said was evidence of fraud that looted the bank of its capital. They alleged, for example, that $515 million in loans fraudulently remained on the bank's books after they had been sold.

The failure cost the federal bank insurance fund an estimated $563 million.

The bank had bought high-risk loans from around the country and bundled them into securities. Bank executives were said to have tried to conceal the resulting massive losses from federal auditors, at one point burying dozens of boxed bank records beneath a hilltop field. A few executives embezzled more than $30 million in bank funds, the regulators alleged.

Several former executives of the bank were convicted of charges including obstructing a federal bank examination, mail fraud and conspiracy, and given prison terms.