Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

UK response to Law Commission SARs report: consent regime retained; no statutory guidance or advisory board; ECCTA 2023 offers limited threshold changes and exemptions

Published on: 01 March 2024

Published by a LexisNexis Corporate Crime expert

Legal News

Article summary

The recommendations accepted by the government

On 12 February 2024, the government issued its reply to the Law Commission’s report. Although most of the Commission’s recommendations were accepted, wholly or in part, the practical impact on the current SARs framework is slight, and real change is limited. Measures that keep matters as they are were approved, including retaining the consent regime, leaving unchanged the process for handling SARs linked to international criminality, and declining to provide a statutory definition of suspicion. Several other recommendations were endorsed only in a qualified way, with caveats and constraints. Further research into targeted reporting (where in specified circumstances filing a SAR is mandatory) was agreed in principle; however, the government said it had already covered this when passing the ECCTA 2023 and elected not to pursue it further. The question of how a financial institution deals with mixed funds (money suspected to be partly criminal proceeds) has been addressed through amendments in the ECCTA 2023; yet these measures do not meet the Law Commission’s proposal to state clearly that no criminal offence is committed when a financial institution is preserving criminal funds. In short, the government’s stance largely preserves the existing SARs regime...

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