FATF Issues New Set of 40 Recommendations Expanding Scope of Money Laundering

On June 23, 2003, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) issued a new set of its Forty Recommendations. The Recommendations include: an expansion of predicate offenses, coverage of persons responsible for due diligence (e.g., casinos, real estate agents, dealers of precious metals/stones, accountants, lawyers, notaries and independent legal professionals, trust and company service providers), together with the change to an objective standard of "suspicion" to make suspicious activity reports, the extension of many anti-money laundering requirements to cover terrorist financing bring enormous transformations of the law and will exert significant pressures and challenges on governments, international organizations, and the private sector to implement all the changes -- and at a time when much of the world was still trying to adjust to the first generation of anti-money laundering standards. The FATF exercise was important in that for the first time it allowed the private sector to have access to some of the documents in which the proposed recommendations were discussed and had two oral meetings with interested private sector groups to obtain comments on the proposed recommendations?[more]