Bank secrecy law needs amendments

Just to be clear, our lawmakers themselves are the ones who have made it difficult (and continue to make it difficult) for the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) and the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) to quickly act and look into accounts of individuals who are under suspicion of money laundering, terrorist financing, corruption or illegal financial transactions.

- MARIANNE GO

Thus, if our legislators truly want to heed the call for transparency, address conrupton: and prove that they are not using the bank secrecy law to hide their own unex-lained wealth, they should now rt promptly to ase the necessary amendmenis to lift the restrictions on the bank secrecy law.

As currently crafted, the Philippines’ bank secrecy law imposes restrictive conditions for the BSP and/or the AMLC to look into individual accounts and put a freeze order on such accounts. The existing bank secrecy law requires the BSP and/or AMLC to first secure a court order to look into suspicious accounts.

Problem is, in securing the court order, information leakage often happens, so by the time the BSP and/or the AMLC secures the court order to look into private individual accounts, the suspected account holders may already have been able to move or empty the bank account.

According to the BSP, as early as 2011, the Group of Twenty or G20 had already declared that the “era of bank secrecy is over” after it endorsed the standards on transparency and exchange of information.

In 2014, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released the standard for automatic exchange of information as the new global standard of obtaining detailed account information from financial institutions, and exchan; ing that information automatically with other jurisdictions for the purpose of combat-ting tax evasion, money laundering and commission of other crimes. This global regulatory watch lifted the cloak of bank secrecy.