The HM Treasury’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (“OFSI”) recently issued a consultation proposing measures aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of its enforcement processes. In the consultation, OFSI is seeking views and comments on proposed revisions that might make its processes clearer, more transparent, and resolve enforcement cases quicker and easier. OFSI emphasized that the proposed changes would only apply to cases involving OFSI’s civil enforcement of financial sanctions breaches and would not apply to the criminal enforcement of financial sanctions breaches or the civil enforcement of non-financial breaches such as trade or transport sanctions.
OFSI is specifically seeking views on the following proposed measures:
- Providing additional guidance on OFSI’s case assessment processes, including a new case assessment matrix, in order to improve transparency and simplicity of OFSI’s penalty processes.
- Introducing a settlement scheme for monetary penalty cases in an effort to reduce the duration of some enforcement cases.
- Introducing an Early Account Scheme (EAS) that would enable firms and individuals that are the subject of an OFSI enforcement investigation to provide, in appropriate cases, a complete factual account of those matters to OFSI as early as possible, which could significantly expedite the investigation stage of a case.
- Offering a streamlined enforcement process with indicative penalties for certain cases involving information, reporting and licensing offenses and providing separate guidance for these enforcement actions, in order to resolve cases more quickly and provide greater clarity and consistency on how these offenses will be enforced.
- Changing the statutory maximum penalties for financial sanctions breaches.