News

Law firms required to provide data under new AML requirements

More than 6,000 law firms in England and Wales who fall within scope of anti-money laundering regulations are to be required to provide us with new data on the scale and potential risk of their work.

As an anti-money laundering supervisor under the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, we have a duty to assess the AML risk within law firms we supervise.

To help fulfil this duty, firms must return a form providing information on the extent and scale of their potential exposure to AML risks. To collect this information, we are contacting all firms in scope of the AML regulations requiring them to provide necessary details by the end of July.

Data firms are required to provide cover areas such as:

  • The value of work conducted for their largest single client
  • Physical cash thresholds
  • How much higher risk work they conduct
  • Number of internal concerns raised about potential money laundering risk, and suspicious activity reports (SARs) submitted

Firms are required to provide all information based on their last calendar, business, tax or rolling year, which ever definition is easiest for them to collate information for.

We will use the collected data to help analyse potential AML risk posed by the firms we regulate and inform our on-going work to address this moving forward. It is a regulatory requirement that firms provide the requested information; failure to do so may result in regulatory action.

Further information on the exercise has been published to explain to firms what is expected of them.