Canada Toughens Up Against Money Laundering

In response to more stringent international standards worldwide since 9/11, the Canadian Department of Finance has rolled out stricter measures to fight money laundering and terror funding. The new rules address areas of international concern such as reporting suspicious activity, collecting detailed data from customers, focusing on politically exposed persons, and registration with Canadian financial watchdog FINTRAC. The DoF has given banks time up till July 2008 to implement most of the directives, with the expectation that the banks will bear the financial fallout of the changes. In the year 2005-06, FINTRAC reported C$4.75b worth of suspected money-laundering cases and C$256m of suspected terror funding cases.