For some time now, the State Revenue Service has imposed an obligation on all accountants (who are subjects of the Law on the Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) to “block” the transactions of their clients according to certain signs.
Do you know what these signs are?
#1 The Customer is related to persons with whom cooperation with Latvian banks has been terminated
#2 An individual declares income, revenue, savings, assets or changes in their value of suspicious origin
#3 A person sets up several one-person businesses
#4 Incoming transactions make up many small amounts, but outgoing ones make up for large amounts
#5 Buying real estate at an obviously abnormal price
#6 The transaction has no obvious legitimate intent (or connection with personal or business activities)
#7 In one or more transactions, an individual invests cash in a commercial company, pays, lends or borrows from another individual 40,000 EUR or more
#8 Tax evasion
#9 The customer provides unrealistic, confusing or contradictory explanations about the transactions
#10 Account turnover consists mainly of cash transactions
# 11 Problems with customer identification – the customer does not want to provide the usual identification information or provides it in minimal amounts, or provides fictitious information, difficult or expensive to verify, does not provide copies of identity documents; the declared true beneficiary does not correspond to the real one
#12 The customer performs complex or unusual transactions (for which the economic or legal purpose does not have a clear economic or legal purpose)
#13 The origin of the funds used in the transaction is unclear
#14 The parties to the transaction have one address
#15 Suspicious transaction involving a public organisation, association of public organisations or non-governmental organisation (association or foundation)
As you can see, the signs of suspicious transactions are quite vague and easy to misunderstand …
On the one hand, the need to eradicate the shadow economy and suspicious transactions is understandable.
On the other hand, these requirements are contrary to accounting ethics. We are convinced that over time, an accountant becomes the same trustee for a company manager as his family doctor, lawyer or psychotherapist. The customer must be assured of each of these professionals that they will not disclose confidential information and will not rat out at the first opportunity.
Therefore, it is prudent for those outsourced accountants who carefully evaluate each client from the beginning, so that they can trust each other completely after signing the cooperation agreement.
P.S. Next time, let’s talk about what to do if the company’s account has been blocked. See you on the Internet again!