"Negligence Is No Longer An Excuse" - Comment On Law Commission's Anti-Money Laundering Report From Industry Experts Napier

Julian Dixon, CEO of anti-money laundering experts Napier, comments:

“The findings of the Law Commission’s report point to sustained and long-term issues in our anti-money laundering processes that have continued to go unaddressed for years.

“The SARs system, in particular, has long been in need of revision. In its current form, it lends itself to misuse because some companies are treating the system as a tick box exercise. A minority of firms believe that submitting SARs lends them a cloak of legitimacy, even if compliance activity remains weak. This results in a spiralling number of SARs logged, many of them without particular merit.

“This renders these SARs almost redundant as there are far too many to investigate. As the Law Commission has pointed out, many of them contain next to no useful information. When something genuinely criminal then gets flagged, it sinks into a sea of irrelevant material.

“The last year has seen a significant clampdown from authorities across Europe for institutions, and the trend is clear: negligence is no longer an excuse.”