The Reporting Office statistics

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The annual reports of the Money Laundering Reporting Office Switzerland measure the growing intensity of the system. In 2025 the Office received 21,087 suspicious activity reports, an average of 82 per working day, which represents an increase of 39.3 per cent compared with 2024, when it had received 15,141. Since the introduction of the goAML information system in January 2020, the volume has almost quadrupled, with 91.3 per cent of reports coming from financial intermediaries in the banking sector.¹ In 2025 the Office forwarded 1,375 cases to the prosecuting authorities, an increase of 31.5 per cent.²

The rise has been continuous: 7,639 reports in 2022, 11,876 in 2023, 15,141 in 2024, 21,087 in 2025.³ Each report concerns 1.8 business relationships on average.⁴ In 2024, 21.7 per cent of reports were made under the right to report provided for in Article 305ter, paragraph 2, of the Criminal Code. In 5.6 per cent of cases, intermediaries indicated that they had broken off negotiations to establish a business relationship because of a reasonable suspicion.⁵

This increase reflects several factors: the strengthening of supervisory practice, the extension of the duty to report, the growing awareness of intermediaries, the improvement of detection tools and a tendency among institutions to report out of caution, in order to protect themselves against criticism. It raises the question of the capacity of the Office and the prosecuting authorities to handle this volume, and of the real effectiveness of the system. One academic commentary noted that the number of referrals to the prosecuting authorities had fallen in 2023, to 866 from 1,232 in 2022, and that the statistics on judgments, published until 2018, were no longer being published.⁶

The responsibility of those in charge of compliance has increased. Between 2014 and 2022, the Federal Department of Finance and the Federal Criminal Court handed down at least twenty-one final convictions for breach of the duty to report. Forty-seven proceedings were pending at the end of 2022.⁷ Compliance officers, including at more junior levels, are now called to account.

Worked example. A medium-sized Geneva bank with 20,000 business relationships that reports 0.5 per cent of them each year sends 100 reports to the Reporting Office. If each report requires an average of twenty hours of work from the compliance, legal and client relationship departments, or 2,000 hours a year, and if the fully loaded hourly cost is CHF 150, the duty to report alone costs CHF 300,000 a year, not counting the detection systems and the analyses that do not result in a report. The figures are fictitious.

Notes

1. Money Laundering Reporting Office Switzerland, Annual Report 2025, fedpol.admin.ch. ↩
2. MROS, Annual Report 2025, cited above. ↩
3. MROS, Annual Reports 2022, 2024 and 2025, fedpol.admin.ch; Allnews, “Forte augmentation des annonces de blanchiment d’argent en Suisse en 2024”, 2 May 2025, which gives a slightly different figure for 2024. ↩
4. MROS, Annual Report 2025, cited above. ↩
5. MROS, Annual Report 2024, cited above. ↩
6. “Communiquer ses soupçons au MROS contribue-t-il à combattre efficacement la criminalité économique ?”, Haute École Arc, 14 May 2025. ↩
7. Haute École Arc, cited above, citing a presentation by Doris Hutzler of 8 June 2023. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.