SAR gazing

Timon Molloy, Editor

“Looking good,” Star Trek watchers may remember, is how Captain Kirk expressed satisfaction as the starship Enterprise boldly went where none had gone before. The Suspicious Activity Reports Regime Committee, on the bridge of the UK Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) is equally buoyant in its ‘captain’s log’, the latest annual report for 1 October 2008 to 30 September 2009 [1]. Sufficiently confident that the basics are now right, after “extensive work… to bring the regime up to a standard acceptable to regime participants,” the Committee sets out a longer term approach: over the next three years the aim is to “increase the value and impact of the SARs regime.” Not exactly radical perhaps but then it reflects the solid progress since the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) took charge in April 2006.