Anti-Money Laundering

When I decided to start ABC and Teal I was very clear about one thing. I will not scaremonger, use fear to sell our services.

In compliance there are serious consequences for failing, massive fines in Data Protection and custodial sentences in AML, not to mention striking off by the SRA!

But you all know those things. You don’t need me to tell you that compliance needs to be effective in your firm to mitigate the risks of these consequences.

The consequences often seem very remote – unlikely, not something that will apply to me – and I think that is correct most of the time.

However, I have woken this morning to more criticism of our profession by Ben Wallace, Security Minister, saying solicitors must do more to prevent money laundering, and that failure to report will lead to sanctions and prosecutions.

I sat in a meeting this week, as I do many weeks, with lawyers who do not recognise this criticism of being professional enablers or of under reporting. Who don’t understand why they are being criticised, or “tarred with the same brush”.

Today’s message from government is clear – professionals who enable money laundering will be scrutinised, and there is a high probability of action.

My message today is this – MLROs/COLPs/MLCOs – ask yourself these 5 questions to establish whether you are confident your firm is doing enough.

1. Are you confident your policies and procedures are effective? Have you had any examples where something should have been spotted earlier, particularly if you have had a production order about a case.
2. Are you confident all issues are reported to you? Have you had any reports from the high risk areas? If not, are you confident staff know what to look for?
3. Do you turn cases away because you have concerns about the due diligence, source of funds? If the answer is yes you can point to evidence which says your risk assessment process works in weeding out suspicious cases and stopping money laundering.
4. Does your CDD procedure properly consider the source of funds? Often CDD is mainly focused on Client ID – which does not prevent money laundering. You need to be able to demonstrate you have considered the source of funds and wealth and thought about any red flags.
5. Are you confident on the law, what you must report, what the level of suspicion is, how to report?

If any of these answers are no, I would urge you to address them urgently.

Help is available on the Law Society website, the updated guidance from the Legal Sector Affinity Group is essential reading.

Get in touch

We can help too! Find out more about our AML services or alternatively, contact one of our helpful experts today.

It is very easy to silo oneself when immersed in the world of investigating money laundering and to forget that actually it isn’t just about currency, commodities and hidden profits, but it’s about people.

I have investigated a plethora of cases during my career and the focus is usually centred upon the villain and the criminal gains. How often do we actually sit down and examine how many people have been damaged along the road to the conviction? We get the conviction, we take back the proceeds of crime via the machinations of POCA and we send the villain to jail. Do we know what happened to all the others that were affected somewhere along the way to the Courtroom steps?

Just like fraud, I have often heard people say that it is a victimless crime. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Money laundering is a crime that many people consider irrelevant to them. If it is a problem at all, they consider it is a problem only for banks. That is far from true. Money laundering has massive effects, not only on financial institutions, but also on governments, industries, economies and also individuals.

What are the effects of these widespread crimes that fly under the radar of much of the population? And why are these effects so massive?

To understand the reasons you need to understand the nature of money laundering. It is not an overt crime like robbery or assault; it is secretive and buried under multiple layers so as to avoid detection. It is also not headline news. How often do you see a laundering case at the top of the News at Ten? It’s not a headline grabber and so the consequences of this crime also get buried in the myriad stories about Brexit, Russian Spy Poisoning and Britain’s Got Talent!

Have you ever stopped to consider what might be under your nose when taking a stroll through the main street of your town or through a large, out of town shopping mall? Have you ever considered the rise and proliferation of the nail bar?

That is not to cast aspersions over every nail bar in the land, but have you ever considered how a business, with seemingly very few customers in an area of high business rates, is able to sustain itself?

I have investigated a number of cases involving nail bars. They are often used as a ‘front’ for cannabis farms. These farms are often linked to organised crime, often of Asian or Vietnamese origin.  The profits of the sales of cannabis are often laundered by creating fictitious sales or customers on the books. A simple scheme where no one is really hurt?

Cannabis farms don’t run themselves. The crop needs tending. Organised criminals don’t employ a local firm of horticulturalists. They often turn to human trafficking to find their staff.

When Police conduct search warrants at these cannabis farms they usually find a single male ‘gardener’ on the premises, locked into the building and controlled by others who are higher up the food chain. This male is usually living in fairly squalid conditions, sleeping on a camp bed if he’s lucky, and left only with sufficient food and water to exist. The ‘gardener’s’ sole function is to tend to the lucrative crop. There will be no pay or rewards beyond basic existence.

This is the reality of laundering. A person who has been trafficked. A prisoner in a foreign land with no rights or standing. They may actually have a better standard of living than in their homeland and do not view themselves as victimised, but a victim they are.

Money laundering and financial crime hurts real people.

Money launderers need to engage with professionals to enable their funds to be assimilated into a legal system. As professionals in this arena you will come into contact with launderers. They will want your assistance.

By engaging with launderers, whether knowingly or unwittingly, you become part of the problem.

Perhaps you may now look differently when engaging with some businesses. What lies beneath?  Think……..What can I do about it? What should I do about it?

Get in touch

We assist firms everyday with practical advice on AML and on how to spot the signs of money laundering in real life.  Contact us today for more information.

Regulation 21 of the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017 requires that a firm which is regulated, implements internal controls where appropriate to the size and nature of the firm.

These controls are:

1. Appoint a person to be responsible for compliance with the regulations
2. Screen relevant employees, both before the appointment is made and ongoing thereafter
3. Establish an independent audit function

So, what should the ‘controls’ look like and what is the appropriate ‘size and nature’?

Controls

In my experience, in legal services we don’t have many controls in place. Our colleagues in other industries, such as financial services have lots. A control exists to check the efficacy of a policy and procedure. By way of an example, I am betting your firm has a confidential waste policy, “you must not put client information or confidential data in the normal waste paper bin”. You will have a procedure which says “You must put confidential waste in the bin for confidential shredding”. Very few firms however have a control which says “we will check the waste paper bins weekly to ensure that no confidential data has been put in there”.

It’s great to have policies and procedures, but we usually only find out if they are effective when something goes wrong, by which time it’s too late to avoid the damage that the policy and procedure was designed to avoid.

The Regulation 21 controls are designed to make sure you have someone who is tasked with making sure that the regulations are complied with, we have people who know how to comply with them, and that we check that they are working.

Size and Nature

Implementation of these controls depends on the size and nature of the firm. When we were drafting the guidance at the Money Laundering Task Force we grappled with how does a firm decide on the size and nature. It’s not an easy thing to define. The Legal Sector Affinity Group decided on:

Factors you may consider when determining whether it is appropriate to apply those controls include:

• The number of staff members your practice has

• The number of offices your practice has and where they are located (including whether your practice has overseas offices)

• Your client demographic

• The nature and complexity of work your practice undertakes

• The level of visibility and control that senior management has over client matters

(taken from the draft Legal Sector Affinity Group Guidance).

Sole practitioners who do not employ any staff are not caught by this by virtue of regulation 21(6).

In practice, I think firms will have appointed their COLP as being responsible for compliance (which is arguably already their job by virtue of the SRA authorisation rules). I think firms will be obtaining references for new staff, at times carrying out more rigorous criminal records type checks, and will be thinking about testing staff understanding after training courses.

I think less straight forward is establishing whether a firm needs an independent audit function. My personal view, (rather than of the Law Society) is that a firm does not have to be very big in order to be required to do this. Take this example, a firm that has about 50 people, across 2 offices, with all the staff collecting and recording their own due diligence, and lawyers making decisions about what sorts of inquiries to make regarding the purpose and nature of the transaction. Does the MLRO know that his policies are adhered to and are effective? If, hand on heart, he would say no, an audit would give him that visibility. The mischief the control is trying to get at is to ensure that the firm knows if the Policies, Controls and Procedures they have in place are working.

So if you decide you are the size and nature to need an independent, who is going to do it?  Do you have staff the with requisite knowledge and capacity to carry out the audit? Are they able to acting independently? I think that resourcing alone would be a struggle for many of the smaller firms, and indeed a fair few of the larger firms, who might have an audit function, but without the necessary experience in AML.

An audit should include review of the policies and procedures, interviewing staff and reviewing files and accounts processes to ensure that the policies and procedures are deployed correctly.

Help

With that in mind, we have put together a package of support for firms who can’t resource their audit internally. We can:

• Review existing policies and procedures, including firm and matter risk assessments

• Carry out on site review of systems, policies and procedures

• Interview staff members to test understanding

• Provide feedback of observations and recommendations for improvement

In addition we can help

• Rectify policies and procedures

• Develop controls to ensure constant visibility as to compliance

• Provide tailored in-house training to all staff members to embed learning

• Provide ongoing support and monitoring

Get in touch

If you are still unsure how the AML size and nature test applies to your firm, get in touch with one of our experts today.

The wicked, the criminals, are continuously innovating, and creating new ways to make money out of crime. They are also money laundering, on an epic scale. The scale of money laundering in the UK is thought to be £90bn a year.

2017 was a year of change in AML and financial crime, with the long awaited Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017 (MLR), and the Criminal Finances Act. There was plenty to think about and do. But it doesn’t stop there. The wicked don’t, so we can’t. Here are 4 things you will need to tackle in 2018.

1. Final Guidance

The Legal Sector Affinity Group have prepared guidance for firms on MLR 2017, which is currently in draft form on the Law Society’s website. The guidance has been submitted to HM Treasury, and is currently going through the approval process. It is hoped the guidance will be finalised within the next couple of months. Once the final guidance is released, firms will need to take steps to finalise their policies and procedures.

2. Independent Audit Function

Regulation 21 MLR requires that a firm, where appropriate to the size and nature of its business, establish an independent audit function to examine and evaluate the adequacy and effectiveness of the policies, controls and procedures. Firms will need to consider how to resource this, whether they can do that internally or externally, and consider the scope. Many firms already include CDD in their file review process, but audit may be much wider, reviewing accounts and risk assessment processes.

3. Implementation of the Criminal Finances Act (CFA)

2017 saw the introduction of the CFA, and the Corporate Offence of Failing to Prevent the Criminal Facilitation of Tax Evasion. Firms also need to be aware of the provisions around the extension to the Moratorium Period (r10), the new Information Sharing Powers (r11) and Further Information Orders (r12) which came into force on the 31st October 2017. Policies and procedures for dealing with these may need to be introduced, and staff training delivered, particularly in relation to the Information Sharing Powers, and how to respond should someone seek to share information about a client with them.

4. Amending Directive to 4MLD

On the 15th December the amending directive to the fourth Money Laundering Directive was agreed. This revision of the 4MLD, aims to:

• increasing transparency on who really owns companies and trusts by establishing beneficial ownership registers;
• preventing risks associated with the use of virtual currencies for terrorist financing and limiting the use of pre-paid cards;
• improving the safeguards for financial transactions to and from high-risk third countries;
• enhancing the access of Financial Intelligence Units to information, including centralised bank account registers

Member states will have 18 months to implement these changes, so firms may need to make further changes to their policies and procedures soon.

It is clear we are a long way off from “Business as Usual” in AML, with a lot of change still to navigate and embed.

Get in touch

For more information about our AML services, simply get in touch with our experts today.