Bank's obligations related to prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing in the light of amended regulations

Abstract

The Act of 1 March 2018 on preventing money laundering and terrorist financing entered into force on 13 July 2018 and repealed the Act of 16 November 2000, substituting for it and introducing a series of changes in the system of preventing those negative phenomena. They consist in the need for obliged entities to assess the level of risk of money laundering or terrorist financing and, as a result, to take adequate financial security measures. A deeper analysis of the Act results in a conclusion that many of the newly enacted regulations, in fact, refer to terminology that is quite often not clear and unambiguous enough. Such a state may cause difficulties with the application of its provisions, which in particular concerns obliged entities, i.e. entities on which the Act imposes obligations connected with the protection of the financial system against the use of those entities to launder money or finance terrorism. On the other hand, banks hold a leading position in this system both in the sphere of regulations and actual, active involvement in preventing those phenomena. It results, inter alia, from prevention mechanisms that have been worked out for many years as well as internal regulations that can really contribute to the elimination of those financial institutions’ participation in money laundering or terrorist financing. Therefore, it can be assumed that they constitute a kind of “model” obliged institutions for which the Act of 1 March 2018 is of fundamental importance. It seems to be especially significant that the presented expectations are not always supported by adequate norms, which concerns not just the idea of preventing money laundering but the requirements and methods of determining them in the Act of 1 March 2018. The present article is devoted to those issues.