The Institute of Estate Agents of SA (Ieasa) says it is actively engaging its agents to help them comply with the request by the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) for risk and compliance returns, reports BusinessLIVE.

As previously reported, this information is required by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which placed SA on its grey list in February 2023 because of the deficiency of its regime for combating terrorism financing and money-laundering.

The comment by Ieasa chair Ivan Neethling followed a warning by FIC executive manager for compliance and prevention Chris Malan on Wednesday, that estate agents and legal practitioners were not complying in sufficient numbers with submitting the returns. Malan said legal practitioners and estate agencies were the high-risk sectors.

The failure to submit returns threatens to derail SA’s bid to be removed from the FATF grey list.

The FIC needs to gather all its reports by the end of March to meet this deadline.

Neethling said Ieasa had ramped up its training, documentation, and risk-management compliance programme packs, especially since SA was greylisted, to ensure that practitioners were able to to remain updated, upskilled and compliant.

‘Ieasa has held dozens of workshops during 2023/2024 regarding the Financial Intelligence Centre Act and compliance. These online sessions were attended by hundreds of property practitioners and business property practitioners.’ 

Law Society of SA (LSSA) executive director Tony Pillay also said the society had compiled a risk-management compliance programme to assist legal practitioners with compliance.

‘In the upcoming weeks, the LSSA will be conducting a series of webinars on Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA) compliance. During the webinars, legal practitioners will be given practical scenarios on how to be FICA–compliant.’

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