In a rare admonishment of a Group of Eight nation, the Financial Action Task Force said Friday that Japan has failed to address gaps in its illicit finance controls despite commitments to do so.
Officials from 26 U.S. agencies and departments have begun a formal evaluation of the country's legal and regulatory vulnerabilities to illicit finance as required by an international anti-money laundering organization.
A dearth of trained staff, ineffective mutual evaluations and questions raised by last year's audit of Cypriot efforts to foil financial criminals motivated an intergovernmental group's adoption this month of new quality controls.
Resolving the growing tension between data privacy restrictions and anti-money laundering laws and overseeing the next round of mutual evaluations will define Russia's stewardship of a global anti-money laundering group, say analysts.
A new grading system by an intergovernmental group on how effectively jurisdictions fight money laundering and terrorist financing is likely to compel global financial institutions to rethink their geographic risk-rankings.
Some jurisdictions will likely struggle to comply with a call by the world's top anti-money laundering watchdog to assess their own vulnerabilities to financial crime, say industry experts.
U.S. officials will soon ask an influential intergovernmental group to call on its members to relax laws preventing bank affiliates from sharing data on suspected financial crimes, say sources.
The world's premier financial crime watchdog declined Friday to suspend Turkey's membership and disclosed how its assessors will begin evaluating jurisdictions on the efficacy with which they fight illicit finance.
Europe's biggest financial institutions are largely prepared to comply with newly proposed amendments to the EU's anti-money laundering directive, compliance officers and banking attorneys say.
The Financial Action Task Force is set to implement a two-tiered grading system for future mutual evaluations as part of an effort to better score the efficacy of anti-money laundering regimes.