Anti-money laundering policy: A response to the activity of criminals or of agencies?

The narrative within this chapter is built around the twin agencies of the FSA and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) and their role in AML, recognising that both agencies now exist in a different form. Thus we consider the ‘matrimonial’ relationship between the regulators and the regulated entity that is internal to the financial markets. We further consider how both relate to the police enforcement agency, an agency that is external to the financial markets and in our metaphor is the silent jealous lover. It is the external enforcement agency that we suggest to be the ultimate beneficiary of the outcome of their joint compliance effort. This is played out through the regulatory ‘rituals’ that define the terms of engagement for the different sides, where each knows the rules, how they should be adhered to and both benefit from their continued existence; tending towards a mutual support for the status quo. Indeed, their relationship can be viewed as that of a married couple where the initial ardour has long since departed but they stay together in mutual tolerance because their history is jointly constructed and co-dependent such that one could no longer envisage life without the other. It considers evidence from a range of material taken from public sources and uses for illustration, previously unpublished data that has been collected from three semi structured interviews that were conducted in June and July 2009 with Money Laundering Reporting Officers (MLROs) based respectively, in a financial institution, a firm of accountants and from within the gaming industry. These were selected as representative of the range of professions that fall within the AML regulatory framework.