If we have someone approach us to deal with a let property campaign on their behalf do I then need to submit an Internal Suspicious Activity Report for Money Laundering purposes?
My concern is I have done several of these over the years and never submitted an ISAR report, on the flip side if anything gets followed up it is obvious where it had come from as they approach us confidentially to assist.
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David Winch posted an article on this some time back.
To (badly) summarise, if they came to you and said 'I've not disclosed for years, please help me to sort out' then, DEPENDING ON WHICH PROFESSIONAL BODY you / your employer are a member of, no report.
If you discovered the issue during other work or you are not a 'relevant professional adviser', then report. Here's the detail so you can ignore my summary and look at the specifics.
https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/tax/business-tax/the-tax-amnesty-soca-an...
In any case as you are referring to an internal report I would expect staff to make this anyway and leave it to the MLRO to decide if privilege applies.
An interesting dilemma. Not withstanding what the esteemed David Winch has advised you may want to consider your position. There has been critism that accountants are not sending in enough SARs. This apperas to based on pure numbers not on the contents.
So I always submit a SAR in cases where there is a failure to pay the tax on time and a correct tax retrurn has not been submitted
PJ, you may want to re-consider whether you should be sending in a SAR in all cases, as when the privilege reporting exemption applies, even though you may wish to submit a SAR, you shouldn't. Doing so is a breach of client confidentiality.
See;
https://www.icaew.com/technical/legal-and-regulatory/anti-money-launderi...