News Excerpt: 

India achieves an ‘outstanding outcome’ in FATF mutual evaluation 2023-24  by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

More about the news: 

The Mutual Evaluation Report of India, which was adopted in the FATF plenary held in Singapore from June 26 and June 28, places India in the “regular follow-up” category, a distinction shared by only four other G-20 countries.

Key highlights of the report:

• India had reached a high level of technical compliance with its requirements.
• The country’s anti-money laundering (AML), countering the financing of terrorism (CFT), and counter-proliferation financing (CPF) regime was achieving good results, including international cooperation, access to basic and beneficial ownership information, use of financial intelligence, and depriving criminals of their assets, etc.
• It recognised the efforts made by India on the issue of mitigating the risks arising from Money Laundering /Terrorist Funding (ML/TF), including the laundering of proceeds from corruption, fraud, and organized crime, and the effective measures implemented by India to transition from a cash-based to a digital economy to reduce ML/TF risks.
• It recognised the implementation of the JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile) Trinity, along with stringent regulations on cash transactions, has led to a significant increase in financial inclusion and digital transactions.

Required field of modifications:

• FATF has observed that improvements are needed to strengthen the supervision and implementation of preventive measures in some non-financial sectors.
• It needs to address delays relating to concluding ML and TF prosecutions, and to ensure that CFT measures aimed at preventing the non-profit sector from being abused for TF are implemented in line with the risk-based approach, including by conducting outreach to NPOs [Non-Profit Organizations.