BNZ given anti-money laundering warning
Friday, 8 July 2022
The Reserve Bank has issued a formal anti-money laundering warning to BNZ.
It was issued under section 80 of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) Act for failing to report the correct location for around 50,000 domestic physical cash transactions in prescribed transaction reports (PTR) between November 2018 and April 2020.
BNZ identified the cause of the failure to be a technical coding error, which led to it providing incorrect location information for these transactions to the Police Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).
The Reserve Bank said, upon being alerted to the error in its reporting, BNZ promptly remediated the matter, and had fully co-operated with the investigation.
**READ MORE:
* Reserve Bank warns Westpac over anti-money laundering system failures
* Anti-money laundering compliance is too expensive, too many supervisors
**
Reserve Bank deputy governor Christian Hawkesby said it highlighted the importance of reporting entities testing their AML/CFT compliance systems.
“We appreciate that design errors can occur. This reiterates the importance of reporting entities regularly testing and validating the coding for AML/CFT systems to ensure they are correctly designed and implemented,” he said.
“The PTR regime is important for building an intelligence picture across New Zealand’s financial system. Unfortunately, these coding errors compromised the quality of the information held by the FIU. We note that BNZ self-reported this issue to us, and has worked hard to remediate the issue and provide the FIU with the corrected information. BNZ’s ongoing cooperation is appreciated.”