Banks, tax advisers, and other financial services have reported that the Netherland’s authorities are too weak to handle the volume of suspicious transactions reported to them. The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) is responsible for evaluating reports of suspicious transaction to identify the real ones before passing them to the prosecution service (OM) or the Tax Authority’s Investigative Service (FOID), however, it has been noticed that less than 50% of reported reports were passed to the prosecution office or FOID, and as noted by the Dutch Association of tax advisers (NOB) and the register of tax advisers (RB), the OM and FOID are only able to investigate little percentage of the total reports due to insufficient number of staff.
Trouw Newspaper also noted that banks had similar issues before and they have hired many new employees to enhance the fight against money laundering. However, the public sector seems to be lagging behind in hire people for this purpose. FOID and OM were unable to provide an actual number of reports that were investigated.
