AML/CFT Approaches to Tax Evasion in Payment Institutions

Abstract

This article focuses on the issue of tax evasion and approach of compliance officers in payment institutions thereto. As tax evasion represents a phenomenon that remains attractive globally and certain percentage of economic activities will still remain connected to such illegal acting, it’s necessary that attention will be paid to it. The primary aim of this article is to identify and define effective methods of compliance officers or departments in relation to their clients or their transactions where certain elements or aspects of tax evasion activities can be detected, in particular based on the obligations vested in national acts, covered by the Directive (EU) 2018/843 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2018 amending Directive (EU) 2015/849 on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purposes of money laundering or terrorist financing, and amending Directives 2009/138/EC and 2013/36/EU (hereinafter referred to only as the “AML Directive”). Hypothesis of this article will test the statement that compliance department applies adequate methodology and properly worded questions may differentiate between clients that are putting their efforts into money laundering, in particular tax evasion, and clients with legal intentions. First part of this article will describe existing legal framework covering the area of money laundering where the method of analysis, synthesis and descriptive method will be applied. Second part of this article focuses on respective approaches to different tax evasion efforts with the main methods of deduction, synthesis and empirical research. Certain element of comparative analysis will be applied as well. Weakness of this topic is the insufficiency of expert literature for this area when majority of sources come mainly from the publishing of international organisations and partially from the monographies of different authors covering this area only in a form of a side topic. Based on this fact, this work is mostly based on sources from international organisations as from monographies.