MLR1PP10450 - Penalty Guidance: Disclosure of breaches: Unprompted disclosure

To encourage compliance we will allow generous reductions to the starting penalty when businesses make a full unprompted disclosure or confess that they have breached the Regulations. To benefit fully from these reductions we also expect businesses who make such a disclosure to make an undertaking which specifies how they intend to become fully compliant with the Regulations.

An unprompted disclosure means that the business must contact us before we initiate any type of enquiry or Intervention. The correct way to make a disclosure is via our website. See MLR1PP2110 

This will enable one of our Officers to contact your business at the earliest opportunity.

• A disclosure is unprompted if it is made at a time when the person making it has no reason to believe that we have discovered the error
• Otherwise it is a prompted disclosure
• There can be no halfway house between prompted and unprompted. It is either one or the other

(This text has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000)

The minimum reduction for an unprompted full disclosure is 30%, even where the breaches were deliberate, providing the business has not been involved with, or complicit with, any primary money laundering offence.

In practice we will only accept that a disclosure is unprompted if it is made:

• Voluntarily
• Via our website or in writing
• Before we contact a business about any previous warning letters or penalties
• Before we write to a business or send them a registration pack because we suspect they are trading illegally
• Before we write to a business about arranging a Compliance Visit
• Before we contact a business by any method as part of a Compliance Intervention

Contacting a business includes leaving a message with a colleague or family member or sending a fax or an e-mail to a confirmed number or address. We consider this to be prompting. If a business makes a disclosure after this, it will only qualify as a prompted disclosure.

It will not be possible for us to tell if a disclosure is full or partial before we have visited the business, or in the case of a registration breach before we have at least discussed the circumstances with the business on the telephone.