Jamaica: An Update on Money‐Laundering Legislation
| Published date | 01 February 2000 |
| Date | 01 February 2000 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb027250 |
| Pages | 354-358 |
| Author | Bryan Sykes |
| Subject Matter | Accounting & finance |
Journal of Money Laundering Control — Vol. 3 No. 4
Jamaica:
An Update on Money-Laundering Legislation
Bryan Sykes
In a previous volume of this journal Miss Shazeeda
Ali made a brief analysis of the Jamaican Money
Laundering Act (MLA) in which she made a
number of important observations.1 Since that
time,
the MLA has been amended twice, the last
time in March 1999. The purpose of this article is
to highlight the main features of the amendments.
THRESHOLD TRANSACTION
REPORTING
The Money Laundering Act (MLA), even though
passed in December 1996, was not brought into
force until 5th January, 1998, together with regula-
tions made pursuant to s. 10 of the Act.2 The Act
attracted so much attention from the financial
sector that even before it was brought into force it
was amended after strong representations were
made by the sector.3 The sector was concerned that
the burden placed upon it to report all transactions
that had reached the required threshold level4 was
too onerous.
The law, as it stood before the 1997 amendment,
required that all transactions at or above the threshold
figure be reported. The sector argued that the law
should be restricted to certain types of transactions,
otherwise the duty to report would include all trans-
actions involving cheques, electronic transfers and
cash. The law as worded, it was argued, meant that
even inter-account transfers within the same branch
of a financial institution would have to be reported.
All this meant an increase in costs that had to borne
by the financial institutions.
The MLA, it was further argued, made no
provision for electronic filing even though some
institutions had the capacity to submit their reports
in this manner. This meant that all the reports
would have to be completed in hard copy by hand,
or if completed on a computer, the report would
have to be printed, signed and then sent to the
designated authority.
Finally even if the Act made provision for
electronic filing the designated authority (the body
established to receive the reports) did not have the
capacity to receive the data in this form. This
meant that the reports would have to be completed
manually, which was very time consuming.
These representations found favour with the
government, and the result was an amendment to
the Act restricting the reporting of threshold trans-
actions to cash transactions that involved the 'physical
transfer of currency from one person to another'.5
It may be said that this exemption was too wide
given the fact that suspicious transaction reporting
was not a legal requirement at the time of this
amendment. However, it cannot be denied that
anti-money-laundering legislation should always
seek to strike the appropriate balance between law
enforcement requirements and the free flow of com-
mercial activity. Financial institutions should not be
burdened with reporting requirements that yield
little or no benefit. In short there must be a
trade-off.
A threshold transaction report is not an intrin-
sically startling document and by itself would be
unlikely to generate any money-laundering investi-
gation. Such a report would quite likely have to be
united with other information before a money-
laundering investigation could be launched. Indeed,
there seems to be very little data on the number of
money-laundering investigations initiated solely by
a threshold transaction report.
As Ali correctly observed: 'sifting through the
[threshold] reports will be like looking for the pro-
verbial needle in the haystack.'6 The needle in this
case being a threshold report that will present some
bit of information that attracts the eye of money-
laundering investigators.
Despite this concession by the government the
financial sector complained that even with just
reporting threshold transaction involving cash the
burden was still too onerous. They argued that
there were many transactions at or above the then
threshold of US$10,000 which would need to be
reported to the designated authority. They urged a
raising of the threshold reporting figure. In response
to this latest complaint Parliament, in March 1999,
amended the MLA yet again.7 This time not only
Journal of Money Laundering Control
Vol.
3,
No.
4,
2000,
pp.
354-355
© Henry Stewart Publications
ISSN 1353-5201
Page 354
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