More businesses now have to put systems and processes in place to help tackle money laundering and terrorism financing. Support is available to help you understand and do what’s required.
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Under the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) Act, three government agencies act as supervisors to support and oversee the businesses that have to comply with the law.
To find out if you’ll have to comply with the Act, see the information specific to your sector at:
Tackling money laundering and terrorist financing
The Department of Internal Affairs will supervise Phase 2 businesses.
The three existing AML/CFT supervisors – the DIA(external link), the Reserve Bank of New Zealand(external link) and the Financial Markets Authority(external link) – will continue to oversee Phase 1 businesses.
Supervisors play a critical role in combating money laundering and terrorism financing by:
What will my supervisor do?
Some of the things your supervisor will do are:
A range of existing guidance material is already available to help get you started. [Note: links coming soon.] Now the Bill has been passed, we plan to engage with sectors to develop regulations, which will provide more clarity, and produce more guidance material.
Your supervisor may ask for information and access to your AML/CFT documents and customer and transaction records to make sure you’re complying with the Act.
By law, you must give your supervisor information or access to information when they ask for it.
How often you’ll need to do this will depend on various factors. Supervisors take a risk-based approach. This means they focus more on supervising businesses that provide products and services which are more at risk of being misused by criminals.
If your supervisor has any concerns about your systems and processes or you don’t comply with the law, you’ll have to fix issues that need attention.
You might be given a warning, which may be made public in some circumstances.
There are penalties if you seriously breach the law. For breaches of civil offences, individuals can be fined up to $200,000 and companies can be fined up to $2 million. Repeated failure to comply with AML/CFT obligations, providing false or misleading information and other criminal offences can result in fines up to $5 million for businesses, while individuals can be fined up to $300,000 or sentenced to up to 2 years in prison.
Your supervisor may ask for information and access to your AML/CFT documents and customer and transaction records to make sure you’re complying with the Act.
By law, you must give your supervisor information or access to information when they ask for it.
How often you’ll need to do this will depend on various factors. Supervisors take a risk-based approach. This means they focus more on supervising businesses that provide products and services which are more at risk of being misused by criminals.
Point of Sale resources which you can display and use to provide information to your customers about money laundering and terrorist financing, are available for businesses.
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