Reporting suspicions

The duty to report under Article 9 AMLA

The reporting duty is the point at which private compliance becomes part of criminal prosecution. Under Article 9 paragraph 1 letter a AMLA, a financial intermediary must report to the Money Laundering Reporting Office without delay if it knows or has reasonable grounds to suspect that assets involved in the business relationship are connected with an offence under Article 305bis SCC, originate from a felony or a qualified tax offence, are subject to the power of disposal of a criminal or terrorist organisation or serve the financing of terrorism. Letter b adds a duty to report when the intermediary breaks off negotiations to establish a business relationship because of such a suspicion. Dealers have a corresponding duty. For more than two decades the notion of reasonable grounds to suspect, the begründeter Verdacht, was defined only by case law and supervisory practice. The revision of 2021 wrote a definition into the statute. Since 1 January 2023 a reasonable suspicion exists when the intermediary has a concrete indication or several indications that the assets are connected with one of the listed offences and when the clarifications under Article 6 AMLA cannot dispel this suspicion.¹

The definition confirmed the practice of the Federal Supreme Court and of FINMA, which had held that the threshold for reporting is low. A financial intermediary does not need certainty or even a high probability that the assets are criminal. It must report when it cannot exclude a criminal origin after completing its clarifications. The interplay between Article 6 and Article 9 is therefore central. The clarification is the instrument by which a suspicion is either removed or confirmed. An intermediary that fails to clarify therefore cannot rely on the absence of a confirmed suspicion. The Federal Supreme Court has held that the omission to report is a continuing offence as long as the business relationship continues. The duty persists as long as the assets can be discovered and confiscated. It continues even after the prosecuting authorities have learned of a suspicious transaction, as long as they have not seized the assets.²

The duty to report is enforced by criminal law. Article 37 AMLA punishes the intentional failure to report with a fine of up to CHF 500,000 and the negligent failure with a fine of up to CHF 150,000.³ The Federal Department of Finance prosecutes these offences under the Federal Act on Administrative Criminal Law. The accused are natural persons, usually the client adviser, the compliance officer or the member of management who decided not to report. For a compliance officer in Zurich the prospect of a personal criminal fine from the Federal Department of Finance is a real one. It is one of the reasons why reporting thresholds in practice have fallen and why the number of reports has risen steeply.

The right to report under Article 305ter paragraph 2 SCC

Alongside the duty stands the right to report. Under Article 305ter paragraph 2 SCC, persons who professionally accept, hold on deposit or assist in investing or transferring outside assets are entitled to report to the Money Laundering Reporting Office any observations that indicate that assets originate from a felony or from a qualified tax offence.⁴ The right to report covers cases below the threshold of reasonable suspicion, where the intermediary has doubts that its clarifications have not resolved but lacks concrete indications. For many years Swiss institutions used the right to report as a softer alternative to the reporting duty. In its evaluation of 2016 the FATF found the reporting system insufficiently consistent, partly because the boundary between the two routes was blurred and reports were often made late. Since 2023 both kinds of report have been subject to the same procedure, including the termination rule of Article 9b AMLA.

The statistics show the shift. In 2024 some 72.5 per cent of reports were filed under Article 9 paragraph 1 letter a AMLA and 21.7 per cent under Article 305ter paragraph 2 SCC.⁵ In 2025 the share of mandatory reports rose to 76.6 per cent, while the share of voluntary reports fell to 17.4 per cent and reports on broken-off negotiations accounted for 5.7 per cent.⁶

The procedure after a report

The procedure after a report has changed considerably since the Act of 1997. In the original system the financial intermediary had to freeze the reported assets immediately and for five working days. That automatic freeze alerted clients and made intermediaries reluctant to report. The revision of 2014, in force since 1 January 2016, reversed the approach. During the analysis by the Reporting Office, the intermediary executes client orders concerning the reported assets (Article 9a AMLA) unless the order would frustrate forfeiture. The freeze under Article 10 AMLA applies only when the Reporting Office informs the intermediary that it is forwarding the report to a prosecuting authority. It lasts until the prosecuting authority decides, but at most five working days from that notification.⁷ The revision of 2021 abolished the fixed deadline for the Reporting Office to analyse reports, because the volume of reports had made the deadline unworkable.⁸

The intermediary may not inform the client or third parties that it has filed a report (Article 10a AMLA). Limited exceptions allow information to be shared within a group, with other intermediaries involved in the same relationship and with supervisory authorities. The prohibition lasts as long as the procedure is pending. It creates a delicate situation for a relationship manager in Zurich who must continue to serve a client whom the bank has reported, possibly for months. Article 11 AMLA protects the reporting intermediary: a person who reports in good faith, or who freezes assets in accordance with the Act, cannot be prosecuted for breach of official, professional or business secrecy and is not liable for breach of contract.⁹

Termination of the relationship under Article 9b AMLA

The most important procedural change of 2023 concerns the end of the business relationship. Before the revision an intermediary that had reported a client was in an awkward position. It could not end the relationship without risking the reproach of warning the client, yet it did not know whether the Reporting Office had forwarded the case or was still analysing it. Article 9b AMLA now provides that the intermediary may terminate the business relationship if the Reporting Office has not informed it within forty working days that the report is being forwarded to a prosecuting authority. The right applies to reports under the duty and under the right to report.¹⁰ When terminating, the intermediary may allow withdrawals of significant assets only in a form that allows the prosecuting authorities to follow the paper trail. It must inform the Reporting Office of the termination.¹¹

The rule has transformed practice. Zurich banks now routinely terminate reported relationships after forty working days if they have heard nothing. In 2025 the Reporting Office received notifications of 7,770 terminations under Article 9b AMLA, an increase of 9.2 per cent over the previous year. In 1,462 reports the intermediary had announced its intention to terminate in advance.¹² The mechanism brings certainty for the intermediary, although it raises a policy question. A relationship that a Swiss bank terminates after a report will often move to another institution, sometimes abroad, while the client learns indirectly that something has happened.

The Money Laundering Reporting Office

The Money Laundering Reporting Office Switzerland (MROS) is part of the Federal Office of Police (fedpol) in Berne. It is the Swiss financial intelligence unit. MROS receives and analyses reports, requests additional information from financial intermediaries and exchanges information with foreign financial intelligence units. It forwards cases to the cantonal public prosecutors or to the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland when its analysis confirms the suspicion. Since 2020 reports have been submitted electronically through the goAML system developed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.¹³ Under Article 11a AMLA the Office may request information from financial intermediaries other than the reporting one when its analysis shows that they are or were involved in a transaction or relationship. In 2025 it made 1,096 such requests. About a quarter of them were based on the analysis of a foreign financial intelligence unit.¹⁴

The number of reports has grown at a rate that no other indicator of the Swiss financial centre matches. MROS received 5,964 reports in 2021, 7,639 in 2022, 11,876 in 2023, 15,141 in 2024 and 21,087 in 2025, an increase of 39 per cent in the last year alone.¹⁵ In 2025 this meant an average of 82 reports per working day. Banks filed 91.3 per cent of all reports, payment service providers 2.6 per cent and virtual asset service providers and fintech companies 1.3 per cent. Fraud was the suspected predicate offence in 64.3 per cent of reports, followed by forgery of documents and embezzlement. In 29 per cent of reports no specific predicate offence could be assigned. The Office forwarded 1,375 cases to prosecuting authorities, an increase of 31.5 per cent. Of these cases 90.5 per cent went to cantonal prosecutors and 9.5 per cent to the Office of the Attorney General. The public prosecutors of the canton of Zurich received the largest share, 15.1 per cent, followed by Vaud with 12.7 per cent and Geneva with 9.7 per cent.¹⁶

These figures carry several messages. The rise reflects the stricter reporting duty, the pressure of FINMA’s supervision and the fear of personal liability. It also reflects the growth of online fraud, which generates large numbers of reports concerning comparatively small amounts. MROS itself has drawn attention to the gap between the volume of reports and its resources. With about 57 full-time positions in 2025 it is much smaller than its counterparts in Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Hong Kong. The Office has responded with automation, a short-form template for simple cases and scoring modules for reports and risks. Since August 2025 it has also published “negative typologies”, which describe reports that add little value.¹⁷ The feedback from the prosecuting authorities is uneven. For cases forwarded between 2021 and 2024, the Office had received procedural information on about half by the end of 2025.

For Zurich the statistics confirm what practitioners observe. Zurich is the largest single destination of MROS referrals among the cantons, which gives the cantonal prosecution service a heavy load of money-laundering proceedings arising from these reports. The organisation of that service and its work on economic crime are described in the preceding chapter.

Notes

1. Pestalozzi, “GwG-Revision” (above). The note quotes the statutory formula of “einen konkreten Hinweis oder mehrere Anhaltspunkte”. ↩
2. Swiss Federal Supreme Court, judgment of 7 August 2018, BGE 144 IV 391, summarised in the Digitale Rechtsprechung collection of the University of Bern, https://www.servat.unibe.ch/dfr/bge/c4144391.html. The case concerned a transfer of EUR 190,000 in June 2010 that had not been reported and the question of when the seven-year limitation period began to run. ↩
3. PwC, Bekämpfung der Geldwäscherei (above), commentary on Article 37 AMLA. ↩
4. Swiss Criminal Code, Article 305ter, bilingual text on droit-bilingue.ch, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-en/3/31/311.0-305ter-373.html. ↩
5. Money Laundering Reporting Office Switzerland (MROS), Jahresbericht 2024 (May 2025), https://www.fedpol.admin.ch/dam/fedpol/de/data/kriminalitaet/geldwaescherei/jabe/jb-mros-2024.pdf.download.pdf/jb-mros-2024-d.pdf. ↩
6. MROS, Jahresbericht 2025 (May 2026), https://www.fedpol.admin.ch/dam/de/sd-web/05JKPvNkIrsY/jb-mros-2025-d.pdf, section on the legal basis of reports. ↩
7. law.ch, LAWINFO, “Neuerungen Geldwäschereigesetz (GwG)” (above). The revision of 2014 also gave the Reporting Office twenty working days to decide whether to forward a report. ↩
8. Art. 23 AMLA in its current version, as amended by the Federal Act of 19 March 2021 with effect from 1 January 2023 (AS 2021 656), contains no deadline for the analysis of reports, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/955.0-23-36.html. The intermediary’s protection now lies in the right to terminate the relationship if the Reporting Office does not respond within 40 working days under Art. 9b para. 1 AMLA, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/955.0-9b-17.html. ↩
9. PwC, Bekämpfung der Geldwäscherei (above), commentary on Articles 10a and 11 AMLA. ↩
10. Pestalozzi, “GwG-Revision” (above). ↩
11. Art. 9b paras. 2 (withdrawal of significant assets only in a form that allows the paper trail to be followed) and 3 (immediate notice of the termination and its date to the Reporting Office) AMLA, inserted by the Federal Act of 19 March 2021, in force since 1 January 2023, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/955.0-9b-17.html. ↩
12. MROS, Jahresbericht 2025 (above), section on Article 9b AMLA. ↩
13. MROS, Jahresbericht 2024, fedpol, https://www.fedpol.admin.ch/dam/fedpol/de/data/kriminalitaet/geldwaescherei/jabe/jb-mros-2024.pdf.download.pdf/jb-mros-2024-d.pdf, which dates the introduction of goAML to 1 January 2020 and notes that incoming data volumes have more than tripled since then. ↩
14. MROS, Jahresbericht 2025 (above), section on information requests under Article 11a AMLA. ↩
15. fedpol, Jahresbericht 2025, “Geldwäscherei: Zahl der Meldungen steigt um mehr als einen Drittel an”, https://fedpol.report/de/report-2025/zahlen/geldwaescherei-zahl-der-meldungen-steigt-um-mehr-als-einen-drittel-an/. ↩
16. MROS, Jahresbericht 2025 (above), statistical section. ↩
17. MROS, Jahresbericht 2025 (above), sections on technology and on data quality. The report gives comparative figures of about 80 positions in Luxembourg, 110 in the Netherlands and 100 in Hong Kong. ↩

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.