Some UK Lawmakers Eye Dropping Small Businesses from Crime Bill

The scope of the United Kingdom’s economic crime bill may be narrower than some hope.

Some lawmakers have proposed excluding small businesses from the laws that the bill would implement, and some have considered excluding money laundering and false accounting from the rules’ scope, the Financial Times (FT) reported Monday (March 13), citing unnamed sources.

One part of the economic crime and corporate transparency bill that is now going through the U.K. parliament enables the prosecution of businesses that fail to prevent such crimes, according to the report.

Some ministers plan to alter the bill so that it does not affect small businesses, saying that such a rule would burden these businesses, the report said.

Others, who oppose this move, had hoped it would cover businesses of all sizes and said that exempting small businesses would cause problems around the definition of “small business” and would allow criminals to get around the law by working with small businesses rather than larger, regulated ones, per the report.

Another dispute around the bill’s scope involves a proposal that companies could be prosecuted for lacking “reasonable” or “adequate” controls to prevent fraud. Currently, such prosecution can happen only when someone at the organization intended to commit fraud, according to the report.

Some ministers are working to make these “failure to prevent” provisions apply only to fraud — not to money laundering and false accounting, the report said.

Others said the hurdles to prosecution for fraud should be lower — as they already are for bribery and tax evasion — and the scope of the actions covered by the bill should be broader, per the report.

As PYMNTS reported in August, this bill comes at a time when countries worldwide are sanctioning Russia and its oligarchs — which has moved the U.K. government to bolster its ability to track illicit funds and prevent money laundering.

The bill is also being considered in one of the world’s biggest financial centers, which, as such, attracts a variety of criminals looking to hide their transactions among the mass of legitimate ones.