Efforts to raise the regulations following Fintrac report
The BC Law Association has left new policies to continue their efforts to combat money laundering for lawyers, including mandatory training in the profession.
Incoming 2025 President Brook Greenberg introduced the ward Austin Cullen’s recommendations in June 2022 to many – but not to everyone – as part of BC’s money laundering study.
It is that lawyers do not have to report large and suspicious transactions-whether in cash or electronic transfers-channel financial transactions and reports analysis center (FINTRAC) in order to maintain a lawyer right to maintain a lawyer right. .
The Canadian Supreme Court confirmed this reporting in the loophole in 2015.
The Commission struck the observations partly because lawyers gave their confidence accounts to spend money, especially through real estate.
The FINTRAC report of 2024 stated that “this gap in legislation in anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing controls can attract professional money laundering, organized crime, and groups of international organized crime that seek to use the industry to transfer and cover illegal funds and activities.”
In 2022-23, FINTRAC discovered a total of 2,400 suspicious transaction reports that reported units (banks, accountants, notary and equity lecturers) were joined by lawyers and/or law firms with so-called. “Professional money laundering” systems.
This allows the Lawyers to regulate member lawyers.
Greenberg was convinced that society was only healed in a sufficient system.
Society seeks to tighten the rules for cash paid for legal services and detention. Lawyers already limit cash to $ 7500, except for rewards. Now, cash payments “must be proportional to the requirements of the detention or reasonably expected payments and that the instructions are ready to help determine what is” relative “,” society suggests.
Cullen also recommended better customer identification and verification (CIV). Society now proposes a clearer language that outlines when CIV takes place.
Cullen also recommended more clarity on how society defines the restrictions on the status deposits “directly to legal services”.
Cullen suggested how “still restricts the use of trust accounts so that they are used only when needed”.
Instead of giving an express recommendation, society has decided to give lawyers better instructions.
Society also intends to introduce the obligatory one -off anti -money laundering (AML) training for all lawyers, not just for those who have the most at risk of money laundering, as Cullen recommended.
The working group does not specify what education requires, but suggests that it recognizes the areas of the greatest risk.
James Legh, a member of the Law Society Board, said that AML training should have a mandatory training of trust accounts because he has followed some lawyers, even a high profile, signable checks they should not have. “
Greenberg’s remarkable regulation must balance the detected risk and general interest.
The working group did not deal with some Cullen recommendations, especially in terms of cooperation and knowledge sharing.
For example, Cullen recommended that society “review and evaluate its approach to determine whether it has information or documents that may be evidence of a crime, and, if there is, the CEO’s application from the disciplined committee to provide information or documents to the law enforcement. “
At the meeting, Greenberg also aroused the possibility that the proposed new regulatory authority would be absorbed under the law of AML in society.
“We think this is applied, regardless of what happens to the legal regulation of this province,” Greenberg said.
Society is currently challenging BC’s Minister of Justice in court, claiming that the law is unlawful of the constitutional lawyers to manage the new regulatory authority.
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