BVA group’s Sean Kemsley recently coauthored a paper published in the Journal of Financial Crime, entitled “Tax evasion and money laundering: a complete framework.” The article applies the definition for money laundering laid out by the G7 Financial Action Task Force to explore the conceptual relationship between tax evasion and money laundering. It concludes that fundamentally, tax evasion can be thought of as a special case of money laundering, and that changing statutes to explicitly recognize this connection would result in a more cohesive legal framework. To review the complete paper, please click here.
Note
1. It is well understood that the converse hypothesis that all money laundering is a form of tax
evasion is not true because offenders often intentionally pay taxes on unlawful proceeds to help
legitimize them (Schlenther, 2013, p. 131).
References
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Further reading
FATF (2012), “International standards on combating money laundering and the financing of terrorism
and proliferation: the FATF recommendations”, available at: www.fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/
documents/recommendations/pdfs/FATF%20Recommendations%202012.pdf
MER-United-States (2016), “MER-United-States pdf”, FATF Definitions, available at: www.fatf-gafi.
org/faq/moneylaundering/
G7 Finance Ministers (1998), “Conclusions of G7 finance ministers”, available at: g8.utoronto.ca/
finance/fm980509.htm
OECD (2011), “The launch of the Oslo dialogue on tax and crime – closing statement by Norway”,
available at: www.oecd.org/ctp/exchange-of-tax-information/launch-oslo-dialogue-closingstatement.
pdf
Office of the Comptroller of Currency (2002), “Money laundering: a banker’s guide to avoiding
problems”, available at: www.occ.treas.gov/topics/bank-operations/financial-crime/moneylaundering/
pub-money-laundering-bankers-guide-avoiding-probs.pdf
Corresponding author
Deen Kemsley can be contacted at: dkemsley@tulane.edu
