In 2022 Buchanan Macdonald was acquired by Edge Advisory. We are an advisory and accounting firm on the North Shore, who take the time to understand your purpose, your ‘why’ and help you achieve success. You define what success looks like, as it will be different for everyone. Whether that be of a financial nature and/or getting back time to focus on other important matters in your lives.

New Zealand has passed a law called the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 (“the AML/CFT law”). The purpose of the law is to counter the impact that this criminal activity has on people and economies around the world.

Changes to the AML/CFT Act has meant that from 1^st October 2018, Accountants must satisfy a number of requirements to help combat money laundering and terrorist financing in order to help Police bring these types of criminals to justice. The services that Accountants and other types of professional services provide may be attractive to those involved in criminal activity, hence the Act coming into practice.

We are required to assess the risk we may face from the action of money launderers and people who finance terrorism and must identify potentially suspicious activity. To make that assessment, we must obtain and verify information from prospective and existing clients that we have not always needed to ask for before. This part of the Act is referred to as Customer Due Diligence.

Customer Due Diligence (CDD)

CDD requires our firm to undertake certain background checks before providing services to clients.

At an absolute minimum, the information needed includes:

• Your full name; and
• Your date of birth; and
• Your residential address

We must then take reasonable steps to ensure the information provided is genuine therefore we must obtain supporting documents which shows the information to be true. Typically the supporting documents will be either a passport or a driver licence for photographic ID which confirms identity and date of birth and also a utility bill or bank statement which confirms residential address. If original documents are bought into our office, they can be verified here. If the documents are scanned and emailed to us, the details are run through a 3^rd party verification provider which simply verifies the information given to be true and correct.

If you are seeing us about a company or a trust, these requirements will extend to every person involved in the entity and also to anyone authorized to operate the bank account(s) for that entity.  Under the Act, Trusts are considered higher risk and therefore require another layer of customer due diligence which is called Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) whereby we must understand the Source of Wealth (SoW) or Source of Funds (SoF) for the trust. 

If you are unable to provide the information

If we are unable to obtain the required details, it is likely that we will not be able to act for you. Should you have any queries, please contact info@bmca.co.nz.