Abstract
The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA) created new, non-warranted policing roles with specific and extensive powers to investigate the money laundering that is associated with, and an intrinsic part of, serious and organised crimes, and to address the significant threats that these crimes pose (HM Government, 2018 and NCA, 2023). The POCA also permitted those new roles to operate in a variety of public bodies (which will be listed in full later in this paper but include His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the National Crime Agency (NCA), and the Home Office) and, through its sector specific aspects aimed at the regulated financial sector, in the private sector. In doing so, it had a significant impact on the pluralisation of policing in England and Wales. This paper reports on primary research which allowed for a quantitative analysis of how the POCA has impacted policing in terms of who polices, the importance placed on the skill of financial investigation, and the career paths available to those who wish to police, by investigating how many people are working in these roles across the public sector two decades after its enactment.
Keywords
Introduction
Criminal activity is investigated by an increasing number of organisations in the public and private sectors; a diversification within the field of policing that is conceptualised in the literature as pluralisation (Crawford et al., 2005; Stenning and Shearing, 2015; Wakefield 2009) and which has had a significant impact on how crime is managed in England and Wales (Button et al., 2015; Button 2021 and 2022; Button et al., 2023; HMCIC, 2022; Rogers, 2017) by creating an extant position where, if a crime is reported, it may not be to the police and, if it is investigated, there is a strong chance that the investigator will not be a warranted police officer. In 2023 38% of the people who work for the 43 territorial police forces in England and Wales are not warranted police officers holding the powers of Constables (Home Office, 2023).
This article will focus on the individuals who investigate money laundering. As an investigatory discipline, this area has been particularly impacted by pluralisation through the enactment of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA) which created three new policing roles which will be defined later in this article.
It will do this through addressing the following research questions: 1. What policing roles were created by the POCA? 2. Where do these roles exist within the public sector? 3. How many people are working in these roles?
The answers to these questions will allow for a crucial addition to our theoretical understanding of pluralisation and the policing response to money laundering in terms of: 1. How the POCA has impacted the process of pluralisation within England and Wales; and 2. How the POCA has impacted the career paths that are available within policing in England and Wales.
This article is important as it is the first of its kind to explore the impact that the POCA has had on who investigates criminal activity. This facet of the Act is largely absent in the literature. Instead, the focus tends to be on the powers that POCA created, especially around the confiscation regime, and the technicalities involved in this investigative discipline.
Further, it presents a new contribution to the literature around the career options that are available to those who wish to investigate criminality but who do not wish to become a warranted police officer.
The research will be presented as follows:
Firstly, the research will present an explanation of the policing roles created by the POCA, and why these were needed to address the criminological threat landscape. In doing so, this section will also present an overview of how policing has diversified (as part of pluralisation) to no longer be the sole remit of the warranted officer. Secondly, the article will present the research design that was employed to answer the research questions.
The article will then present its findings and discussions. To allow for a detailed analysis and contextualisation of the quantitative data these will be broken down by the groups who are enabled to employ people with powers under the POCA: • The police • The Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs) • The other public bodies and • Local authorities (Table 5 in Supplemental Appendix)
Finally, the article will present its conclusions which will address the key findings from the research, the way these could be used to practically improve the experiences of non warranted investigators and attract people to the roles. In this way the research will show its relevance in praxis as well as in relation to the development of academic theory. First though, to terminology.
The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002
The value of financial investigation as a methodological tool with which to tackle the increasingly diverse range of acquisitive crimes operating on a global scale are well recognised (FATF, 2012, 2020, 2021, 2023; Home Office, 2013).
In England and Wales, a stronger framework was needed to address the “70% of all crime” that “is acquisitive in nature” and may account for “2% of the national gross domestic product – around £18 billion” (Justice Inspectorate, 2004). This led to the enactment of the POCA, which provided extensive powers to allow law enforcement (in a variety of agencies) to track, forfeit and confiscate the proceeds of any acquisitive crime and built on the existing (but no longer sufficient) provisions under the Criminal Justice Act 1988 and the Drug Trafficking Act 1994. It also addressed the need to create “an enlarged cadre of professional, skilled financial investigators” (Cabinet Office, 2000: 51) by creating three new policing roles which will now be described. • The Accredited Financial Investigator (hereafter referred to as the • The Financial Intelligence Officer (hereafter referred to as the • The Financial Investigator (hereafter conceptualised as the
This research is a quantitative study of how FIOs and AFIs are deployed in the public sector. The list of bodies who are able to employ AFIs and FIOs will be explored in the Research Design section.
A quantitative study of the PSFI is not possible because of the variation in role descriptions in the private sector (where those investigating complex money laundering have a range of job titles unlike FIOs and AFIs which are consistent), corporate security concerns (where disclosing staffing data could be sensitive from a competition perspective), and an inability to ensure that all the organisations who might employ people to investigate money laundering in the private sector would be included in the research (unlike in the public sector where a list of such bodies is available to ensure that all have been considered). Given that, more recently, the literature has recognised the need for agencies other than the police, including the private sector, to be part of the solution to address financial crime (Button et al., 2015; Scott and McGoldrick, 2018; Her Majesty’s Treasury, 2018) and been critical of the contributions made by the police (Button et al., 2015; Fraud Review Team, 2006) further study of this area should be strongly considered.
Indeed, recent research has painted a deeply problematic picture of the police response to fraud, and explored what might be needed to rectify a situation requiring urgent attention (Button, 2021, 2022). Pointing to the need for “clearer reforms where greater recruitment of specialist expertise and civilians are advocated” this is seen as “an ‘open goal’ for policing reform” (Button, 2021: 1654). Action Fraud (who receive fraud reports in England and Wales) has “become the focus of media, public, and professional vitriol for non-existent or ineffective response to fraud and related cybercrimes” (Button, 2022: 1758). This research, which focuses on the recruitment and deployment of such specially trained investigators builds directly on these criticisms of the current policing models for financial crime.
Research design
The data presented in this research was gathered through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests which were submitted during July and August 2021 by the researcher directly to each public body permitted to employ AFIs and FIOs (under Statutory Instrument 2707 The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 which expanded the list of public bodies able to employ people with powers under the POCA described by the Secretary of State).
The list of bodies differs slightly for investigation and confiscation powers and the researcher chose to use the list for the former. Although these are two distinct investigatory disciplines they often overlap, and most AFIs will operate in both spheres if for no other reason than to be able to maintain their powers, or due to low resources. The researcher decided not to ask public bodies to differentiate as, for many, this would not be possible; could lead to duplication of data; and only some were likely to have separate teams for investigations and confiscations. As stated it is not possible to quantify PSFIs however efforts have nonetheless been made to maintain a cross sectoral application of this research, and the investigative side of the discipline aligns with the work carried out in the private sector where confiscations would not.
When the research was conducted the list named 21 bodies plus ‘police forces’ and ‘local authorities’. Requests were therefore sent to all bodies, including the 43 police forces and the 377 local authorities.
Although this research refers to non-warranted employees to describe people who work for the police without the powers of Constable the FOIA requests referred to police staff to be mindful of the most common terminology employed within police forces.
The FOIA requests asked each recipient to identify how many people they employed as an AFI or FIO and, for police forces, if they worked in dedicated economic crime units. This allows a contextualisation of this group against the wider population of non-warranted employees in the police and an assessment of how POCA roles are used to support non economic crime types. Some police forces rely on Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs) to provide their financial investigation services so FOIA requests were also sent to them. As each ROCU will draw some employees from the police forces they work with there was a need to avoid duplication, so requests to them stated: I understand that you are a collaborative unit responsible for policing the areas of <geographical area>. My request applies only to staff employed directly by <ROCU name>. I have submitted separate requests to each of those forces about the staff that they employ.
The London ROCU covers the geographical area of London, incorporating the Metropolitan Police, City of London Police and British Transport Police but does not have its own investigative function, meaning these are retained in house by those forces; hence, no request was sent to them.
No personal information was gathered as part of this research, however the FOIA requests did explain that the information to be provided would be published. Written informed consent to conduct and publish the study was therefore obtained in this manner.
Findings and discussions
The police
Full results from police forces.
715 people can be confirmed as occupying the roles created by POCA, accounting for less than 1% of the total 85, 337 people employed in non-warranted roles in September 2021 (Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, 2022) this being the closest Home Office data available for the period of the research. This could indicate a lack of value being placed by police forces on financial investigation as a discipline, and the AFI and FIO as roles for those who are not warranted. The figures would seem to contradict the rhetoric in the extant literature that seeks to extoll the importance of financial investigation as an investigative methodology to address the threat of serious and organised crime and which advocates for it being applied to an increasingly diverse range of acquisitive crimes (FATF, 2012, 2020, 2021, 2023; Home Office, 2013).
AFI numbers per force ranged from 0 to 52, however most forces (34 or 81% of the total) had between 0 and 17, with 22 forces (52% of the total) employing 10 people or less, making this the most common bracket in terms of AFIs.
Three forces said they employed no AFIs (Cleveland Police, Norfolk Constabulary and Suffolk Constabulary). Cleveland gave no commentary on how they facilitate financial investigations or asset recovery in their force area but did confirm they employed two FIOs in their Historical Investigation Unit which is an interesting positioning of the role and an acknowledgement of its versatility in terms of the investigations it can support. Norfolk and Suffolk Constabularies said that although they did not employ AFIs or FIOs directly, the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit (ERSOU) undertook this work on their behalf.
This ties neatly to the other end of the spectrum where Bedfordshire Police said they employed 52 AFIs which is significantly more than any other force (the next highest being 39 at Thames Valley Police and 31 at the Metropolitan Police) but was qualified by them as including all the AFIs who work on the ERSOU, thus rationalising what would otherwise appear to be a significant numerical spike in the data. The ERSOU provides support for and is funded by the seven forces constituting the eastern region (Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Kent and Suffolk) and the lead force is Bedfordshire, hence their reporting on the employment of the AFIs working in the ERSOU.
Although Norfolk and Suffolk source their POCA functions from the ERSOU, two other forces from the eastern region also employ their own AFIs (17 at Essex and 14 at Kent) which is within the main range but at the higher end, indicating perhaps a strategic focus on financial investigation, and a use of the ERSOU for cross border organised crime investigations and counter terrorism policing (both being particular focuses of the ERSOU). It should also be noted that Kent is the 6th largest force by employee numbers (warranted and non-warranted) and Essex are the 8th, with both covering large urban areas and cities which will undoubtedly impact their resourcing decisions. The final two forces in the eastern region, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire, declined to respond for cost reasons.
Analysis of AFIs against overall non-warranted employees for The Metropolitan Police, Greater Manchester Police, West Yorkshire Police, Thames Valley Police and Merseyside Police.
This shows that higher numbers of AFIs in a force do not translate to a percentage outside of the overall figure that was given earlier and, only in two cases, is marginally over 1% of the total non-warranted workforce. In providing this contextualisation the variance in the data is, therefore, seen as part of the more holistic picture.
The numbers of FIOs employed by police forces ranged from 0–32. 11 forces employed no FIOs (Cheshire Constabulary, City of London Police, Cumbria Constabulary, Leicestershire Police, Norfolk Constabulary, Northamptonshire Police, Northumbria Police, South Yorkshire Police, Suffolk Constabulary, West Mercia Police and the British Transport Police). None of these forces employed significant numbers of AFIs either, with only two having more than ten and two employing none. Most of the forces who responded employ between one and five FIOs (19 forces, 45% of the total) and 26% (11 forces) employ no FIOs. Of the remainder, 24% (seven forces) employ between six and ten FIOs, three forces employ between 11 and 20 FIOs, and only 2 forces employ more than 20 FIOs.
Greater Manchester Police employ 32 FIOs, which is significantly more than the next highest number, which is Dorset Police who employ 22. As was noted earlier, Greater Manchester is a large force with the 4th largest overall number of non-warranted employees so their employing more FIOs is not surprising to meet the demands they face. Dorset employs 1443 non-warranted employees meaning that their 22 FIOs represent 1.5% of their total workforce which is still low in terms of the overall population.
Police forces were also asked to quantify how many AFIs and FIOs worked in dedicated economic crime units (ECUs) and how many worked in other areas without a dedicated economic crime focus. This was asked to understand the breadth of investigation types that financial investigation was being applied to, recognising that economic crimes are only some of the many predicates that lead to money laundering and there has been an increase in the range of crime types that investigative bodies are being encouraged to use financial investigative methodologies against (Gilmour, 2017; Gilmour and Ridley, 2015; Keatinge, 2023; Naheem, 2018; Tierney, 2017).
All but one force was able to provide a response to this question, with the exception being South Yorkshire Police who was only able to assert that regardless of the team they worked on, their POCA employees would only work on POCA cases. Given the wide range of acquisitive crimes this could therefore apply to, it cannot be assumed these people work in an ECU and so the data analysis will reflect the results only for the other forces. These responses showed that 427 AFIs and 120 FIOs (78% of the total) work in dedicated ECUs, and the remaining 21% (74 AFIs and 75 FIOs) work in departments without a dedicated economic crime focus. The outstanding 1% reflects the 13 AFIs employed by South Yorkshire Police.
From these results it can reasonably be inferred that the skill sets of the FIOs are particularly valued when investigating non economic crimes, and indicative of the wide remit of the role to support a variety of criminal investigations. The confiscation powers of the AFI (which the FIO does not hold) may be part of the reason why they are more prevalent in dedicated ECUs, which often also house asset recovery functions.
This finding would suggest that further research is needed to understand what crime types FIOs are being used to investigate, and the degree to which they differ from the investigations being supported by AFIs. This could be used to support the suggestion that the FIO role is in fact quite distinct from the AFI role, and not the junior level, or stepping stone, that the literature has previously presented it as. If the type of work that is available to the FIO is, in fact, broader than the work available to the AFI, it would seem appropriate to discuss that role on its own merit as a distinct career choice for non-warranted employees.
West Yorkshire Police chose to mention the Financial Intelligence Assistant (FIA) role in their response
There are also 7 Financial Intelligence Assistants (FIA’s) which is the role under FIO (not inc in the 32). The FIA’s are mostly based outside of Economic Crime departments.
This is a more recent amendment under POCA which allows for additional non-warranted employees to have access to the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) database. At the point of conducting this research the role was not widely utilised but should form the basis for future research. The only other respondent to mention the role was HMRC, and the importance of this will be discussed later.
The ROCUs
Full results from the ROCUs.
Four ROCUs said they did not directly employ any AFIs or FIOs. Three (EMSOU, NWROCU and NERSOU) said their POCA roles were employed directly by the forces in their region (so would be included in their responses) and the ERSOU confirmed their employees had been included in the response from Bedfordshire Police. The response from the NERSOU, provided by Northumbria Police, stated that their POCA roles are employed by Northumbria Police however the YHROCU response (provided by West Midlands Police) indicates a more complicated picture: The NE RECU (North East Regional Economic Crime Unit supports both the YH ROCU and NERSOU-NE Special Operations Unit – NE ROCU) employs 12 police staff AFI’s and 1 police staff FIO. In addition, the ACE (Asset Confiscation Enforcement) team are managed by the Head of NE RECU and the team consists of 5 police staff AFI’s and 1 police staff FIO. The ACE team support both ROCU’s and all 7 police forces of the YH/NE...In addition, across the wider YH ROCU capabilities there are a further 4 police staff AFI’s and 1 police staff FIO
This suggests that a further 21 AFIs and 3 FIOs are employed by the NERECU to support the two ROCUs in its area (NERSOU and YHROCU) and therefore also to support the police forces that utilise the services of those ROCUs. Northumbria Police said in their response that they employ 6 AFIs and no FIOs; the degree to which this is duplicated by the NERECU data is unclear however the numbers given by the force would seem low if they do indeed support the regional unit. This response is indicative of the difficulties that can be encountered when researching police staffing data, and the complex picture that can emerge when resources are being shared between forces.
The other public bodies
Full results from the other public bodies.
It is interesting to note that in these bodies more FIOs are employed than AFIs (379 to 194) which is at odds with the police and ROCUs. The reasons for this warrant further research but could be associated with the FIOs ability to support a wider range of non economic crime types, or due to a lack of need for confiscation investigations in these bodies leading them away from employing AFIs.
The data shows that HMRC employs significantly more FIOs than any other public body, and all of the police forces combined (80 AFIs and 222 FIOs). HMRC stated in their response that in October 2021 they are introducing a new SAR Researcher role, and that there are 879 individual employees working at HMRC who are eligible for powers under this role once it is introduced; this is likely to be utilising the FIA role so will mean that those employees can access the SAR database (a privilege which is currently only enjoyed by AFIs and FIOs). This would appear to be a significant shift in the use of the SAR database which is a critical tool in financial investigations. It would also appear to go someway to addressing the criticisms of the regime whereby the vast number of SARs that are submitted by the regulated sector (under threat of criminal sanction should they fail to make the reports) are not reviewed, let alone acted on.
The most recent data from the NCA states that 901,255 SARs were received during 2021 - 2022, an increase of 21% from the previous year (UK FIU, 2023). This high volume is the result of the incredibly low barrier for defining what is suspicious (The Law Society, 2023) and thus in need of reporting, leading to defensive reporting where the fear of sanctions for not reporting leads to low quality intelligence being submitted. The NCA have acknowledged that they lack sufficient resources to be able to properly analyse the data (Anderson et al., 2023) and are planning to increase their headcount and without legislative change to the reporting requirements there would seem to be few other options to address the problem. This would, therefore, appear to link directly to the data presented here where bodies such as HMRC are clearly recognising the value in utilising financial intelligence and recruiting accordingly. Such a finding is evidence of the continued pluralisation of policing and the employment of the concept of pluralisation to create investigative agencies that are tailored to meet extant criminological threats.
There is a notable omission from the data presented here and that is the NCA. The NCA defines their mission as leading “the UK’s fight to cut serious and organised crime…targeting and pursuing those criminals who pose the greatest risk to the UK” (NCA, 2023) and houses the UK Financial Intelligence Unit which has “national responsibility for receiving, analysing and disseminating financial intelligence gathered from Suspicious Activity Reports…a critical intelligence resource for tackling money laundering, terrorism, serious and organised crime, corruption and fraud” (NCA, 2023). This illustrates the crucial part that the NCA plays in fighting organised crime and the laundering of the assets gained through that enterprise and it would therefore seem logical, based on this, to state that they would employ FIOs and AFIs to achieve its aims. The NCA are exempt from the FOIA however they were asked to participate in this research but did not reply to any of the researchers emails. Their reasons for not wishing to participate are thus unknown but lamented for the gap that they leave in the findings of this study.
The local authorities
74 out of 377, or 20%, confirmed that they employ FIOs and AFIs. Within this population, 138 were AFIs and 60 were FIOs. This is not to say that only 74 use POCA roles as many of the authorities who responded explained having local agreements with other authorities to pool resources for financial investigations when they are required, often via Trading Standards units that encompass larger geographical areas. In those cases, the data was provided by the authority that housed the unit, and deconfliction was done by the researcher to, as far as possible, avoid duplication. The full data set is included as Supplemental material to this article (Table 5 - Full results from local authorities).
Two authorities declined to provide a response due to concerns that, for one authority “releasing information is likely to prejudice the prevention and detection of crime” and for another the data was not provided because “the numbers are very low” so providing the information could breach Data Protection legislation.
57 of those 74 authorities, or 80%, employed between one and three POCA employees. Of these authorities, 29 (or 51%) only employed one POCA employee and, in most cases, this was an AFI (23) rather than an FIO (6). Building on this preference for one role over the other, 38 authorities employed AFIs but no FIOs (with the number of AFIs in any authority ranging from one to seven) whilst only seven authorities only employed FIOs (ranging from one to four). It is likely that this reflects the ability of the AFI to conduct both investigation and confiscation work, and so presenting perhaps a more cost effective or resource appropriate choice for the authority.
These findings tie to the earlier point which it would seem salient to repeat here; pluralisation is shaping policing by allowing all of the bodies that are concerned with investigating potentially criminal activity to tailor themselves to the threats they face. This data has provided ample reason for further research if we are to truly explore the world of pluralised policing and who is policing, and challenge conceptions that this is exclusively (or indeed primarily) the remit of the police.
Conclusions
The data presented here represent the first time that the impact of the POCA on pluralisation has been quantified and contextualised. The findings have shown that significant numbers of people are carrying out financial investigations in bodies that may not historically have been seen as concerned with investigations of that nature. This suggests that there are significantly more career options available to those who specialise in this type of work than may previously have been thought. As such, this is a finding that may go some way to addressing concerns that have been highlighted in the literature around the lack of ongoing career development provided to AFIs in the police and public bodies, especially since the MA in Financial Investigation and Financial Crime (which was offered via Teesside University) was discontinued (Chave, 2017). It would support the assertion made by Chave in his criticism of the limitations in the training and accreditation of AFIs that the scope of crimes they can work on is expanding and the proposition that the acts of confiscation and investigation should be decoupled (Hughes, 2021) to allow AFIs the ability to diversify their careers and apply their skills and experiences in new criminological arenas and bring their experience to the emerging methodologies and ways of tackling them (Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2014; Gilmour, 2022; Turner and Irwin, 2018; Paganini, 2012).
This would indeed go some way towards reframing “the money-laundering framework, by focusing more on the actors involved, and the spaces in which money laundering occurs” (Gilmour, 2023) by recognising the opportunities for FIOs and AFIs to work across a broad range of public bodies; this could, in fact, allow for a reframing of their career paths and be of significant value to those who create the training and accreditation programmes for POCA roles. The findings from this research have significant potential to impact how the idea of the policing career path is discussed in its entirety; the literature has shown that people who apply for non-warranted roles often do so because they want to carry out a specific role within policing, rather than to pursue a general warranted role (Atkinson, 2013; O’Neill, 2019; Rice, 2016). As such, creating a better dialogue around the opportunities that are available to those who wish to investigate, or those who wish to engage with and support communities, in terms of intra and cross sectoral roles presents the chance to capitalise on the way in which the pluralisation of policing has increased the number of bodies concerned with policing activities.
The findings in regards to HMRC are also of significance. Tax evasion is an inherently acquisitive crime, and it could be argued that all other acquisitive crimes include facets of tax evasion as criminals rarely seek to pay tax on their ill gotten gains. From the data gathered here, HMRC would seem to be embracing both sides of this coin and employing more POCA employees than any other body or the police in its entirety.
It is unfortunate that the study was not able to obtain data from the NCA, with their primary focus on organised crime and money laundering, as this may have presented an interesting opportunity to discuss the attention being paid to the discipline through levels of resourcing. The researcher acknowledges that the POCA does include “officers of the National Crime Agency” (Rees et al., 2011) as appropriate officers, and so it could be argued that everyone who works for the NCA is in fact empowered under POCA however this would represent a naive approach to the situation, as there are likely many people within the NCA who do not conduct financial investigations as the main part of their role and many who are in dedicated FIO and AFI roles. It must be hoped that future research will be possible with the NCA, and without their participation a gaping hole will forever remain in our knowledge of who conducts financial investigations into arguably the most serious and complex organised criminal groups.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material - The impact of the proceeds of crime act 2002 on the pluralisation of policing in England and Wales
Supplemental Material for The impact of the proceeds of crime act 2002 on the pluralisation of policing in England and Wales by Cheney Perry in The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical statement
Data Availability Statement
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article and supplemental material.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
References
Supplementary Material
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