British Columbia Casino Operators Introduce New Policies to Fight Money Laundering
The ghost of a three-year-old money laundering scandal is still haunting Canada and British Columbia; British Columbia in particular. Casino operators and regulators have both been equally rendered shame-faced, and new developments crop up at every turn, amplifying this embarrassment. Regulators are now trying to lay new policies to curb money laundering practices.
There are some casino employees still trying to cover up suspicious money trails by shredding records. Regulators have thought of a new scheme they believe will clean up the province’s image once and for all.
Any questionable activity in the province would require to be reported by the citizens. A web page has been created for this purpose where residents can leave tip-offs that they believe warrant investigation by regulators. Seemingly a good plan on paper, the web page is not expected to remain active beyond two months.
These attempts at curbing money laundering have been perceived to be largely phony and an attempt to pacify the general population. The new move is simply more of the same. It can be argued that if regulators were sincere in their approach to weed out the province’s gambling issues, they wouldn’t pull the website off after only two months. Instead, they would allow it to stay long enough to be noticed by the public and be able to effect a significant difference.
Plans of hiring a third-party auditor to monitor a minimum of three casinos have already been voiced by the provincial government. The step was decided upon when the British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC) found that extra oversight was required after they investigated the casinos’ adherence to existing policies. Surprisingly, the venues that didn’t comply weren’t shut down, even temporarily, despite having an entire year to cooperate.
Fresh rules drawn-up by the BCLC
New rules were introduced by the BCLC in January requiring gamblers to fill up a source-of-funds document for financial transactions exceeding $8,000 within a 24-hour time period. The casinos haven’t reacted very enthusiastically to these new rules, and the BCLC too haven’t tried to enforce these rules strictly enough.
Repeated efforts
The law enforcers of British Columbia have continued to battle money laundering operations in the real-estate, luxury car and horse-racing industry throughout this year. However, there has been limited success. Perhaps, the authorities need to be stricter in imposing their new policies to bring offenders to book.
