Accountancies

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are urging Wall Street companies to confess to fraud in exchange for behind-the-scenes deals that would spare them from criminal charges, fines, and public disclosure of their wrongdoing.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has removed Singapore from its enhanced follow-up list but the city-state’s beneficial-ownership safeguards, money-laundering prosecutions, and proliferation-financing controls are still falling short of the risks it faces as one of the world’s largest financial centers.

Thousands of seemingly legitimate UK high street shops are being used by organized-crime groups to launder illicit cash, sell illegal goods, and feed wider criminal networks, with at least £47 billion a year drained from the British economy by the schemes.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) placed Austria in enhanced follow-up after finding the country’s framework for investigating and prosecuting money laundering remains weak more than a decade after similar concerns were first raised.

Accountants, lawyers and real estate agents in Australia will face multimillion-dollar fines for assisting the illicit tobacco trade under a sweeping expansion of anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism financing laws taking effect on July 1.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has agreed to pay HK$1.3 billion ($166 million) in fines and compensation to settle regulatory investigations into its audit work for collapsed Chinese property developer China Evergrande Group. 

The Internal Revenue Service has lost thousands of enforcement staffers since President Donald Trump returned to office. The cuts are fueling fears, and in some cases, hopes, that the agency’s capacity to enforce U.S. tax laws is diminished.

The Justice Department released its first department-wide corporate enforcement policy for criminal matters, establishing a uniform framework for how prosecutors handle corporate cases across the department, except antitrust matters. 

The UK’s current system of supervisors overseeing the anti-money-laundering (AML) programs of law firms, accountancies, and other professional bodies is failing to take “sufficiently dissuasive disciplinary measures” against those that fail to meet compliance standards, according to a new report. 

Australia’s booming cocaine consumption among affluent professionals has helped turn the country into the world’s unlikely cocaine capital, fueling criminal networks linked to murder, human trafficking, and extortion.