Britain’s tax and customs authority, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), is developing a strategic action plan to significantly degrade the ability of organised crime groups to use trade-based money laundering (TBML).

Writing in the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) newsletter, a member of HMRC’s TBML team says the tax authority will do this by improving core capabilities in several ways, including through creating and delivering TBML-focused training products.

Essential improvements

James Leader also says that HMRC is planning better engagement with stakeholders, both domestically and internationally, and with partners in the public and private sector. “To that end we hope to host a TBML summit with our partners in early 2023/24”, he says.

Leader, who recognises that insufficient TBML cases are successfully prosecuted in the UK, says it is essential to improve the intelligence picture by making better use of the data available, including suspicious activity reports (SARs) which contain TBML specific identifiers.

Coordinated response needed

“We can feed these findings back to firms across the regulated sector, to help deepen understanding of how and where they might be exposed to or be at the vanguard of detecting TBML e.g. accountancy service providers who might see their client settling invoices using a previously unknown third party, based in jurisdictions with known beneficial ownership transparency issues,” says Leader.

By its very nature TBML is a multi-sector, cross border threat that requires a co-ordinated response, he concludes.

The NCA newsletter in which Leader’s article, Trade-based Money Laundering – Hidden In Plain Sight?, can be found here.

Categories: Trade Based Financial crimes News

Tags: customs authority, HMRC, NCA, SARS, tax, TBML, UK