New Zealand Asset Recovery: "Recapturing ill-gotten gains - The New Zealand experience so far"
An ongoing balancing act for any society attempting to combat fraud and organised crime is how much effort to put into detecting and preventing such criminal activity up-front, and how much into stripping out or recovering the ill-gotten gains afterwards. Most modern economies push increasing resources into the up-front compliance and detection element on the basis that 'prevention is better than cure' - and, perhaps tacitly, that a range of financial reporting entities will be better placed to identify money laundering activity and bear the costs of doing so.
New Zealand's Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act (the AML/CFT Act) was passed into law with a degree of fanfare in October 209. Only small parts of it are yet in force and its impact to date has been muted, other than in generally raising awareness of the issues. Full implementation, originally intended to be achieved over a two-year horizon, now strolls along to a timeframe that will be more than three years from date of passage.
But a companion piece of law reform in 2009 slipped under the radar to some extent, came into force quickly, and has had an immediate impact. The Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act (the CPR Act) was passed in July 2009 with less fanfare, yet is proving to have real impact for enforcement agencies in recapturing some of the ill-gotten assets and profits of criminal activity.
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