Proceeds of Crime

(asked on 19th July 2021) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what proportion of Suspicious Activity Reports result in action by (1) police, or (2) other relevant authorities.


Answered by
Lord Greenhalgh Portrait
Lord Greenhalgh
This question was answered on 2nd August 2021

The UKFIU does not hold figures for the proportion of Suspicious Activity Reports resulting in action by (1) police, or (2) other relevant authorities. The UKFIU received over 700,000 SARs in 2020/21 and made these reports available for police and other authorities to access, including in some instances allocating particular high-risk reports to specific partners. The cost of establishing actions resulting from each SAR would be disproportionate, noting that:

• a SAR is a report of suspicion as assessed the reporter and is not evidence of criminal conduct.

• a single SAR may be used several times by several different agencies for different purposes e.g. the information within the same SAR may inform a) HMRC about taxation b) local police about fraud or theft and c) a government department about a regulatory issue or a weakness in a financial product.

  • some SARs provide new and immediate opportunities to stop crime and arrest offenders, others support existing investigations or help uncover potential criminality that could be investigated, while others provide intelligence useful at a point in the future.

  • some SARs are disseminated to foreign jurisdictions.

  • even if no criminal investigation is conducted, a SAR may contain information that contributes to understanding current threat trends or patterns. This helps reporters and law enforcement to plan and prevent against new crime trends.

Further information can be found in the Suspicious Activity Reports Annual Report 2020, including that last year almost £172m of assets were denied to suspected criminals as a result of SARs reporting.

Reticulating Splines