Financial profit is a key driver for serious and organised crime (SOC) groups with SOC activities costing the Australian community up to $68.7 billion in 2022–23. We help to remove the financial motivation to engage in criminal activity by investigating financial crime and providing unique and incisive intelligence to our partners to better inform the response to financially motivated criminal activity.
This intelligence builds national knowledge of money laundering, nationally significant tax fraud and other financially motivated crimes. It helps make Australia unattractive for abusive financial arrangements and money laundering and reduces the impact of serious financial crime on the Australian community.
Money laundering is a pervasive, corrupt process which blends criminal and legitimate activities. It stretches across areas as diverse as mainstream banking, international funds transfers and foreign exchange services, gambling, shares and stocks, artwork, jewellery and real estate.
Money laundering is carried out in Australia with sophistication, increasingly with the assistance of professional facilitators – including accounting professionals and other business service providers – which use an evolving range of techniques.
The work of the ACIC on financial crime and money laundering incorporates the work of multi-agency national task forces, including the Commonwealth Criminal Assets Confiscation Task Force, Commonwealth Serious Financial Crime Task Force, Fintel Alliance (led by AUSTRAC). We are also a member of the Five Eyes Money Laundering Community of Practice.