The Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus and AUSTRAC CEO Brendan Thomas formally released our unclassified National Risk Assessments (NRAs) of money laundering and terrorism financing at the National Press Club in July 2024.

These risk assessments provide a collective understanding of the scale, sophistication and threat of these crimes in Australia. They can help businesses understand how criminals launder the proceeds of crime or fund extremist violence and ensure they have the appropriate anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) measures in place.

AUSTRAC developed the risk assessments as Australia’s financial intelligence unit and AML/CTF regulator. However, we did not write them in isolation, we worked with domestic partner agencies. For example, more than 50 partner agencies were consulted for the money laundering NRA. These included law enforcement, intelligence agencies, regulators, social services and taxation authorities at the national and state level.

AUSTRAC also issued surveys to more than 60 financial intelligence units around the world. The surveys sought their perspectives on money laundering and terrorism financing in Australia and their views about Australia being a source or destination for the proceeds of crime or terrorism activities.

To produce the assessments we also looked at: 

• surveys from about 60 reporting entities and 21 industry associations across the banking, gambling, remittance, bullion and digital currency sectors
• financial transaction reporting to AUSTRAC, including international funds transfer instructions, cross-border movements, threshold transaction and suspicious matter reports
• Financial Action Taskforce (FATF) and International Monetary Fund guidance for developing national risk assessments 
• publicly available national risk assessments by other jurisdictions, particularly those that had favourable remarks from FATF in mutual evaluation reports for other countries
• feedback and professional insights offered during interviews, workshops and consultation with key stakeholders
• the Australian Institute of Criminology’s Cost of Crime Report 2022 and the Impacts of Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Report 2024
• the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program Report
• statistics relating to money laundering and terrorism financing prosecutions, obtained from Commonwealth and state offices of the Director of Public Prosecutions
• Australian Financial Security Authority’s statistics on asset confiscations and forfeitures.

For more information, read our national risk assessments. To learn how these risk assessments can help your business meet its AML/CTF obligations, watch one of our newly released sector-specific webinars on our YouTube channel.