The Financial Action Task Force and Global Administrative Law

This paper focuses on the lawmaking power of the Financial Accounting Task Force, (“FATF”) as an international organization and how its work is now being consolidated by being incorporated within the G20's framework for global financial reform. FATF reform therefore constitutes an end run around governments and professional societies to implement legal reforms to combat money laundering and terrorism.FATF reforms to combat money laundering and terrorism have raised high level discussions within leading law societies, like the American Bar Association in the U.S. that is providing a push back to the FATF 40 9, as well as the October 2008 Lawyer Guidance. By contrast, such discussions around FATF money laundering and terrorism financing laws are conspicuously absent in developing countries, where FATF reforms are being promoted through well-funded aid programs and training of government officials, but not to those in the private sector, including those in the real estate industry, the legal profession and accountants. This paper contrasts recent legislation in Kenya implementing the FATF's anti-money laundering standards with the continuing discussion within the American Bar Association and the fact that no State in the European Union has even considered similar obligations on lawyers, the real estate industry or other gatekeepers subject to the FATF's anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism financing standards