The FIU is statutorily empowered to receive a wide variety of financial information from diverse sources. These include reports by financial institutions of unusual or suspicious transaction from other domestic and foreign governmental sources, including customs, income tax, immigration,law enforcement and public prosecution. A key task of the FIU is to analyze this information to uncover evidence of possible financial crime for use by domestic and foreign law enforcement and financial institution regulatory agencies.

 The effective use of the FIU is an essential element of successful anti-money laundering efforts. And to the extent that the predicate crime to money laundering is itself a financial crime, the FIU plays a double role in uncovering financial crimes. The FIU can also play an important role in uncovering financial crime in cases where there are no money laundering involved i.e. where the institution is itself either a victim or a perpetrator of the crime, or where the institution is merely an ancillary instrumentality of the crime. 

Because the FIU is a central gathering point for analyzing a broad range of domestic and foreign financial information, the FIU may be particularly effective at uncovering patterns among large number of complex financial transactions that point to a possible financial crime. for example, many FATF member countries report that a majority of the financial information received and analyzed by their FIUs does not point to possible money laundering, but rather to fraud against the financial institutions themselves, including wire and check fraud, credit card fraud, loan fraud, and embezzlement.Read More...