GACC Workshop Tackles Corruption’s Professional Enablers

Lawyers, accountants, company service providers and other professionals are in a privileged position to help detect and prevent suspicious transactions within the global financial system. However, as revealed in dozens of recent investigations, some professionals within these industries fail to prevent illicit financial flows, or even play essential roles in designing and executing cross-border corruption and sanction evasion schemes.

To help address these challenges, GACC organized a workshop on “Revealing and Reining in the  Professional Enablers of Corruption.” Over three days, civil society experts, government officials, investigative journalists, and private sector representatives gathered to discuss forward-looking strategies to reduce enabling behavior among professional service providers.

Held in Brussels, the workshop began with a two days of closed-door sessions attended by 35 civil society experts, academics and journalists, who discussed the next generation of strategies for collecting, sharing and using data on professional enablers, following years of relying on leaks. The third day brought in an additional 23 in-person participants, including policymakers from the European Commission, U.S. and U.K. governments and representatives of several industry associations, and featured lively debates. 

Watch sessions from the workshop here. 

The workshop’s outputs include concrete ideas for how to collaboratively build a wider evidence base for future reporting and advocacy on enablers, which GACC and other entities will take forward in the coming months. The proceedings also fed into leading policy forums where this crucial issue is under consideration. 

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