An anti-fraud expert fears the Liberals’ newly announced Canada Financial Crimes Agency will turn out to be ineffectual, or worse, persecute some Canadians as was done under the Emergencies Act..The new agency would try to coordinate the efforts of FINTRAC, the RCMP, and the Canada Revenue Agency to fight anti-fraud and anti-money laundering crimes..Vanessa Iafolla, assistant professor at St. Mary’s University and principal at Antifraud Intelligence Consulting, says Canada falls unbelievably short at dealing with financial crimes, but does not know how much the new agency will change that..“They’re looking at things like fraud, money laundering, organized crime, insider training, I’m assuming tax evasion as well. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for it to go well, but there’s also a lot of opportunity for it to be just another agency,” Iafolla said in an interview with Western Standard..“FINTRAC does not have a huge track record of levying administrative monetary penalties or being involved in the laying of charges. Our numbers in Canada are quite low… I find it impossible to believe that so few charges are laid every year. And so I would really be disappointed if the financial crimes agency turns out to be another exercise in optics on behalf of the federal government.”.On February 14, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the Emergencies Act gave the government powers they wanted to make permanent..“We … used all the tools that we had prior to invocation of the Emergencies Act, and we determined that we needed some additional tools. We will be putting forward measures to put those tools permanently in place,” she said..“The authorities of FINTRAC, I believe, do need to be expanded to cover crowdsourcing platforms and their payment providers. So that is something that we need to do, and we will do, and that needs to be in place permanently.”.Iafolla disagrees with how the Emergencies Act was used and what its implications may be on how the new agency will operate..“I really do not believe that that was a necessary use of that legislation. And it was completely off the cuff — like it came out, immediately put it into action, very little guidance. And what was happening were things that the government said that they didn’t want to have happen, right, like people losing their jobs over small donations. People were fired, public servants were fired. And I find that reprehensible,” Iafolla said..“It did undermine the use of the Emergencies Act, and the use of the FINTRAC reporting mechanism did undermine the legitimacy of that system in the minds of a lot of Canadians who otherwise are perfectly law abiding.”.Iafolla believes the Emergencies Act was unCanadian in the way it retroactively ambushed donors to the trucker convoy who at the time were acting within the law..“If in Canada the law is supposed to operate clearly, fairly and nothing can be retrospective, how is it possible then that we can do something like police people’s financial transactions for donations to a protest after the fact, when at the time there wasn’t anything wrong with anyone taking and processing that money?”.One part of the budget Iafolla got behind was a public and searchable beneficial ownership registry would be in place before the end of 2023..“People are able to hide their identities behind shell corporations. In many jurisdictions, they’re able to mask corporations within corporations, or use different kinds of legal structures to hide their own ownership. So the goal of this registry is to increase the transparency around who owns what,” Iafolla said..“You do not have an overwhelming proportion of businesses that are going to be adversely affected by this. And of those that are, it’s the segment of those businesses that are using our legal structures to allow them to carry out illegitimate activities.”
