As you prove your identity ('I'm sorry sir, but it's a legal requirement') to your bank for the umpteenth time, no doubt you wonder whether the mountain of data that money laundering rules produce is of the slightest use to the people with access to it. Well, wonder no more - the second critical study on the use of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) in two years concludes that SARs are under-utilised by most Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), and also reveals that pending the implementation of (uh oh...) a new database system, many of them aren't being used at all.
The study was commissioned by The Association of Chief Police Officers and funded by the Home Office, and although author Matthew Fleming, Research Fellow at the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, appears to have completed it in June, for some strange reason it seems not to have been published until the other week.