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The Dutch reporting system involves a chain of activities: reporting unusual transactions, deducing which of these transactions are suspicious and transmitting the suspicious transactions to investigative services. This reporting system is a multi-agency approach in which the united forces of financial service providers, the FIU and investigative services should help prevent money laundering and organised crime. The reporting system is a good example of a responsibilisation strategy, since it actively involves financial service providers, which are private agencies or professionals. The functioning of such a multi- agency approach depends on some essential elements such as activating the actors in question, coordinating chains of cooperative action and aligning the interests of the various parties. These requirements can present more difficulties than simply bringing the traditional criminal justice system into action (Garland, 1996: 454). This last subsection therefore looks into how these elements have been developed and implemented. Based on this review, we can assess whether the implementation of the anti-money laundering intervention includes some shortcomings that might influence its output.

Activating financial service providers. The Dutch reporting system is broader than the obligations set down in the European directive on money laundering. Instead of a system of reporting suspicious transactions based on subjective indicators, the Dutch system is based on the reporting of unusual transactions as defined by a mix of objective and subjective indicators. As a result of this broad reporting system, the Dutch FIU has received over 400,000 unusual transactions reports since the disclosure obligation came into force. This large number of transactions already indicates that the financial service providers have been successfully activated in the reporting system. At least, this applies for financial institutions, as they are responsible for the largest proportion of the reported transactions. In a couple of years it will be possible to ascertain the reporting behaviour of the non-financial sectors, such as legal professionals, as well. The large number of reports can also be ascribed to the authorities’ enormous attention towards developing lists of indicators for the various actors as well as their supervising compliance with the obligations. Based on these findings, Terlouw and Aaron (1996: 102) evaluated the reporting system positively.

Coordination activities. A recent evaluation study by Faber and Van Nunen is less positive. They conclude that all the attention on the development of and compliance with the indicators has resulted in a reporting system stuck in its first phase (Faber and Van Nunen, 2004: 20). This is illustrated by the large number of reported ‘unusual’ transactions. During the system’s first ten years much attention was paid to establishing indicators and supervising compliance, however, the converting process in which the suspicious transactions are culled from the unusual transactions received less care. Therefore, too much value has probably been attributed to the objective and subjective indicators. Perhaps more effort should be invested in the FIU’s capacity to detect the real money laundering activities. Also, the large number of unusual transactions has snowed under the FIU, leaving it little time to develop solid financial expertise. Consequently, it performs mostly micro-oriented analyses and makes few efforts in the direction of strategic analyses in relation to important policy themes. These micro-oriented analyses enable the FIU to transmit a large number of suspicious transactions to investigative services. However, because little of this information aligns with the needs of the investigative authorities a lot of this data is left unused.

Because of the enormous number of reports and the lack of coordination for handling these reports, it looks like the Dutch reporting system is going to be transformed into a suspicion-based system concentrating on subjective indicators. Such a system would limit the number of reported transactions and perhaps give the FIU the space it needs to develop necessary skills and expertise. However, according to Faber and Van Nunen (2004: 22), such a change is not the solution for dealing with large amounts of information, as it also limits the possibilities for conducting extensive analyses. Administrative relief would not necessary yield improved results. On the contrary, these researchers posit that the huge amount of information that comes from all unusual transactions could actually provide far more detailed insight into money flows and money laundering activities, provided that strategic analyses are used (Faber and Van Nunen, 2004: 67). They argue that many of the possibilities offered by objective-based or rule-based reporting systems are yet to be discovered and there are sufficient reasons for developing these techniques before changing the nature of the Dutch reporting requirements. They suggest that it is too soon for a change from a rule-based to a risk-based reporting system and that instead the possibilities for analysing transaction information should be further developed.

Coordinating interests. A cooperative action problem related to the anti-money laundering initiative has also been identified, as the result of a lack of central management. According to Faber and Van Nunen (2004: 20), because the authorities were unable to strive for a single common objective, the various parties in the reporting system settled for their own objectives by which they focused on their own interests. The financial service providers concentrated on reporting large numbers of unusual transactions, preferably with as little effort

as possible. The FIU strived to uncover as many suspicious transactions as possible, regardless of whether this information could all be used by the investigative services. The investigative services continued their criminal investigations, as they did not see an interest in carrying out money laundering investigations. Most of their effort is in fact directed to criminal investigations of other organised crime activities, mostly drugs trafficking. Obviously, transaction information that fit these investigations was used. However, investigations were seldom started based on transaction information.

With all the attention paid to the first phase of the reporting system, the authorities seem to have lost sight of the objective. Goal displacement resulted, with the authorities losing sight of the actual aim concerning protection of the integrity of the financial service providers and contribution to the investigation of criminal offences. What are the consequences of these findings and how do they affect the results and outcomes of the anti-money laundering intervention? These questions are addressed in the next section.

2.4 Evaluation of the outcomes of the Dutch anti-money laundering