In implementing anti-money laundering and counter financing of terrorism (AML-CFT) regime, costs are often incurred to ensure compliance among reporting institutions. Professor Milind Sathye from the University of Canberra, Australia who is here in Malaysia as a visiting professor at the Accounting Research Institute (ARI) has been invited by CPA Australia office in Kuala Lumpur to give a talk entitled "Cost of AML-CFT Compliance". As a registered AML-CFT auditor, Prof Sathye has conducted numerous research in this area and has indeed published a landmark paper on calculating the compliance costs of AML-CFT. Since the talk was part of CPA Australia's continuous professional development (CPD) program, forty CPA members have registered and attended the evening talk. In tandem with what was suggested by Reuter and Trumen in their 2004 paper, Prof Sathye iterated that the compliance cost of the AML-CFT regime can be classified under three main categories. They are namely (i) Costs incurred by the goverment or the public sector in esytablishing and administering the regime; (ii) Costs incurred by the private sector in carrying out the requirements of government and (iii) costs borne by the general public. Four acceptable methodologies used to estimate the compliance costs are (i) case study, (ii) econometric, (iii) surveys and (iv) analogy. Currently, the Accounting Research Institute is utilizing an online survey methodology to obtain estimates of the AML-CFT compliance costs.
