A Target-Centric Intelligence: How Efficient is Cooperation Between the Local Police Departments and the FIU within the Finnish AML/CTF model?

Abstract

This research intends to address the issues of cooperation and intelligence sharing between the national authorities within the network of Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing regime. In this way, it is aimed to better understand and analyse the underlying issues behind the gaps in effective operational exchange of financial intelligence information within the wider network of national security structures. Therefore, this work contributes to a highly varying and inter-disciplinary academic field of studies on AML/CTF but also wider to the researches on security, terrorism and crime prevention. The academic debates on the methods of measurement of effectiveness of the AML/CFT models has developed a range of different perspectives, which have certain constraints and limitation for analysis. The traditional approach of evaluation relies heavily on the outcome-orientation and, therefore, is not always able to identify the weaknesses on the operational level and related processes. This approach is especially in use in the contemporary official evaluations and assessments of AML/CTF regimes. In this way, this dissertation applies a theoretical framework of a "target-centric" intelligence and tries to go deeper into the intelligence sharing processes to supplement the recent FATF analysis...