News
OECD and FATF to Give Greater Weight to Each Other’s Standards: Former Official
By Brian Monroe
printTwo of the world's most influential intergovernmental groups will more heavily weigh each other's anti-money laundering and anti-tax crime standards in future evaluations, a former official said. Going forward, the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) will evaluate jurisdictions, in part, based on how they comply with the recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), according to Jeffrey Owens, a former director of the tax division who retired in February. The anti-money laundering (AML) and counterterrorism financing standards will be used in the OECD's tax-related peer reviews, said Owens, in...
TO READ THE FULL STORY
Subscribe
Learn More
Related News
The price tag financial institutions will face implementing a newly-endorsed intergovernmental plan to fight tax evasion will be high despite their recent investments to comply with similar American demands.
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.
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.
The Financial Action Task Force threatened Friday to suspend Turkey's membership if the country fails to pass counterterrorist financing laws ahead of a Feb. 22 meeting by the group.
An intergovernmental group that evaluates how countries fight money laundering and terrorist financing will change how it grades compliance with its standards beginning next year, say individuals familiar with discussions.
Guidance expected from the U.S. Treasury Department on how to ease compliance controls on certain low-risk accounts and products will likely be adapted from examples published by an intergovernmental watchdog group, say consultants.
Compliance with beneficial ownership standards will be one of the top priorities for Financial Action Task Force examiners during the group's next round of jurisdictional reviews, a U.S. official said Tuesday.
The world's top financial crime watchdog Thursday disclosed revisions to its blacklists and its widely-cited standards on combating money laundering and terrorist financing.
Divergences in international lists of predicate offenses to money laundering have hampered the fight against financial criminals, according to a report by the Australian government.
The world's most influential advocate of anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing regulations will call for greater scrutiny of political figures and tax crimes next week, say sources.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Council of Europe agreed Tuesday to an updated tax data sharing agreement signed by 14 countries, including the United States.
Many tax havens have done the bare minimum to remove themselves from an intergovernmental group's list of regulatory-lax jurisdictions, at times only signing tax treaties with other bank secrecy countries.