Money Laundering of Serious Tax Crimes: The IEWG Public Bulletin is now available
Tax fraudsters use increasingly complex, transnational schemes that enable them to launder their crimes’ substantial illicit proceeds. Serious tax crimes have significant negative effects on governments’ abilities to use public finances for the benefit of society. Tax crimes are also sometimes interconnected with other financial crimes, like corruption. Therefore, combatting serious tax crimes is a key issue for tax authorities, FIUs and, more broadly, law enforcement agencies (LEA) and judicial systems. With this situation in mind, the Egmont Group’s IEWG launched the “Money Laundering of Serious Tax Crimes: Enhancing Financial Intelligence Units’ Detection Capacities and Fostering Information Exchange” project at the Egmont Group’s 26th Plenary in the Hague (July 2019). To better understand the issues linked with ML of serious tax crimes, the project team sent questionnaires and case surveys to the Egmont Group’s member FIUs. Overall, the project team analysed 50 responses to the questionnaire and 33 to the case survey. The information gathered provided an overview of national legal frameworks on ML of serious tax crimes, the powers and competencies of the competent authorities, including FIUs, to combat it and the role of the private sector. They drafted a general report which is available to competent authorities and observers of the Egmont Group. The “Money Laundering of Serious Tax Crimes” report intends to enhance FIU knowledge on their powers, capacities, and best practices in the fight against ML of serious tax crimes. Moreover, this report, through a best practices toolkit, seeks to provide opportunities for FIUs to consider improvements to both national and international cooperation in order to strengthen their abilities to respond to these crimes. The tools provided in the report and public bulletin will ideally enable FIUs to have timely access to quality tax-related information to assist them with analysis and, in turn, share this information with the relevant national and international competent authorities. UIF-Argentina and TRACFIN, France jointly led this project, which also included collaboration with the FIUs from: Australia Brazil Germany Guernsey Luxembourg Poland Tanzania Ukraine Kindly refer to the bulletin as per link below: https://egmontgroup.org/sites/default/files/filedepot/2020%2C%20Public%20Bulletin%20Money%20Laundering%20of%20Serious%20Tax%20Crimes.pdf