• Lost in the wash
GOOD NEWS for jobsworths: a whole new Jobsworth Opportunity Scheme is coming Into force, appropriately enough on 1 April. From then on, every financial businesses will have to appoint a Money Laundering Reporting Officer, with policies and train- ing programmes and procedure. New cus- tomers must be put through the mangle to make sure they are clean. They may get fed up and go away, but never mind. Staff must be educated amd made aware of their own personal obligations, which the law will enforce. Full records must be kept for five years. Failure to do all this becomes a crim- inal offence, carrying two years in prison — whether or not anyone has made any attempt to launder any money. For big organisations, this will just represent anoth- er dead weight of cost in money and time. For one-man bands, it is a silencer. By the time a financial adviser has cleared his lines with his regulators, old and new, and car- ried out his duties as his own compliance offi- cer and money laundering reporting officer, and seen off the visiting jobsworth who comes to inspect him, he will surely have no time left to sell insurance. Perhaps that is the idea. These regulations, of course, fall outside the scope of the Deregulation Bill.
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