Anti-fraud expert worries that the Liberals’ newly created Canada Financial Crimes Agency, which is a federal agency, will be ineffectual or worse than the Emergencies Act and persecute certain Canadians.
The new agency would attempt to coordinate the efforts FINTRAC, RCMP and Canada Revenue Agency to combat anti-fraudulent and anti-money laundering crime.
Assistant professor at St. Marys University, Vanessa Iafolla is principal at Antifraud Intelligence Consulting. She says Canada fails to deal with financial crimes in a shocking way, but she doesn’t know how the new agency will improve that.
They’re looking at things like fraud, money laundering, organized crime, insider training, I’m assuming tax evasion as well. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for it to go well, but there’s also a lot of opportunity for it to be just another agency, Iafolla said in an interview with Western Standard.
FINTRAC doesn’t have a great track record of levying administrative penalties or being involved with the filing of charges. It is hard to believe that so many charges are being laid each year in Canada, given our low numbers. I would be very disappointed if the federal government’s financial crimes agency turned out to be just another exercise in optics.
The Emergencies Act was announced by Chrystia Freeland, Finance Minister, on February 14. It gave the government the power they wanted to make permanent.
We used all of the tools we had before invoking the Emergencies Act. However, we realized that we needed additional tools. She stated that we will be putting forward plans to permanently put these tools in place.
FINTRAC’s authority must be expanded to include crowdsourcing platforms and their payment providers. We need to do that, and we will, and it should be permanent.
Iafolla disagrees about how the Emergencies Act was used, and what its implications might be for how the new agency will operate.
I don’t believe that this was a necessary use for that legislation. It was totally improvised, just like it came out. They immediately put it into practice, with very little guidance. And what was happening were things that the government said that they didn’t want to have happen, right, like people losing their jobs over small donations. People were fired, public employees were fired. I find this reprehensible, Iafolla stated.
It did not undermine the Emergencies Act and the FINTRAC reporting system did lessen the legitimacy of the system in the minds a lot Canadians who are otherwise law-abiding.
Iafolla believes Canada’s Emergencies Act was unCanadian because it retroactively embezzled trucker convoy donors who were within the law.
If in Canada the law is supposed to operate clearly, fairly and nothing can be retrospective, how is it possible then that we can do something like police peoples financial transactions for donations to a protest after the fact, when at the time there wasn’t anything wrong with anyone taking and processing that money?
Iafolla argued that a public searchable beneficial ownership registry should be in place by 2023.
It is possible to conceal your identity behind shell corporations. In many jurisdictions, they’re able to mask corporations within corporations, or use different kinds of legal structures to hide their own ownership. Iafolla explained that the registry’s goal is to increase transparency regarding who owns what.
This will not affect all businesses. And of those that are, it’s the segment of those businesses that are using our legal structures to allow them to carry out illegitimate activities.