graduate student
St Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
UDC 338
Introduction. Ensuring national security in the economic sphere requires a reliable assessment of the actual scale of the legalisation (laundering) of criminal proceeds. In this regard, the development of scientifically sound principles for constructing a system to analyse the scale of money laundering and identifying its characteristics relevant to the mechanism for combating the legalisation (laundering) of proceeds derived from criminal activity and the financing of terrorism (hereinafter – AML/CFT), is of critical importance. Methods. The main method of the study is the method of dialectical scientific cognition, based on a combination of recognised discipline-specific and general scientific methods. The methodological basis of the study consists of methods of systemic economic and legal analysis, comparative analysis of approaches of the Financial Action Task Force (hereinafter – FATF) and the Eurasian Group on Combating Money Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism (EAG), as well as the method of multi-level decomposition of shadow processes (macro-, meso-, micro-levels). Results. Five basic principles for constructing a system to analyse the scale of money laundering have been identified: multi-level decomposition, complementarity of methods, functional adequacy for risk management, adaptability to changes in money laundering schemes, and controlled transparency of results. Key properties of the system in the context of AML/CFT have been identified: trainable verifiability (calibration using data from real investigations), resilience to data aggregation, sensitivity to threshold values of Federal Law No. 115-FZ of 7 August 2001, vector dynamics (assessment of trends in the “money laundering volume/detectability” pair), as well as the ability to assess the effectiveness of countermeasures. An architectural diagram of the system has been developed, comprising modules for assessing the incoming criminal flow, transactional network analysis, macroeconomic verification and scenario modelling of regulatory decisions. Critical limitations are noted: fundamental incompleteness of coverage of income not included in the financial system; a shift in latency as controls are tightened; non-stationarity of the behaviour of the assessment objects under the influence of the countermeasures themselves. The practical value of the system for Rosfinmonitoring is substantiated: strategic positioning vis-à-vis the country’s leadership and the FATF, tactical optimisation of resource allocation, and a transition to the performance metric “proportion of the estimated criminal proceeds flow blocked”. The importance of publicly communicating aggregated results for building trust between society and the regulator in the AML/CFT sphere is highlighted.
scale of money laundering, principles of system design, properties of the AML/CFT system, complementarity of methods, architectural diagram, economic security
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