To my knowledge, they have never made any claims of compliance. They have only said that they plan to become compliant some time this year.
The bigger issue is that it takes lots of time and effort for back-and-forth with each state to get authorized. One person has maybe the bandwidth to obtain compliance with up to 3 states at a time, and this is for someone who knows the legal background very well. So you need to staff a pretty large compliance department off the bat to become compliant before engaging in money transmission (and thus before earning revenue). That's hugely expensive.
source: I work for a money transmitter.
Anybody reading that article in The Verge would conclude that they have spent the money. That whole article was about assuring people that Mt Gox was safe.
At best they were not straight forward and transparent, at worst they lied.
Not what I want from a company who is asking me to trust them with my money. Frankly I am shocked that their setup in the USA for Dwolla transfers was nothing more than an ordinary Wells Fargo business account.
[1] The email would have been the perfect time to respond with 'well, we haven't actually spent the money on compliance, but we plan to'
In fact, as far as I can tell, federal FINCEN compliance doesn't cost anything beyond the cost of the accounting tools to maintain that compliance (which can be very expensive to buy or develop, to be fair).
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, only a conversational comment on the Mt. Gox affair.
As I understand it, it is federal requirement that they be licensed by each state into or out of which they will transmit money, but the actual licensing requirements are set state-by-state.