Compliance with Customer Due Diligence Under the AML Regime: Some Evidence from Malaysia

摘要

Since 2004, the Malaysian legal professionals have been made as one of the gatekeepers or reporting institutions under the anti-money laundering (AML) regime. Such role brings with it several challenging obligations, including the duty is to conduct customer due diligence (CDD). Despitethe APG Reports in 2007 and 2015 on the problems and their lack of compliance with their obligations, little academic research has been conducted on their CDD compliance. As such, this paper seeks to examine the international and local governance modalities on CDD measures and the extent ofcompliance of such gatekeepers with such measures. This paper adopts a qualitative research in which the primary data is obtained from six case studies of legal firms. The secondary data include international instruments, journal articles, books and online databases. The authors contend thatthe lack of compliance by legal professionals with the CDD measure may depend not only on the size of the legal firms but also on the financial implications and their traditional notion as the facilitating agent rather than the policemen of their clients.