Your AML/CTF program
The program is the document that says how your agency manages its money laundering risk. Here is what has to be in it, and what a template cannot do for you.
The anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) program is the document at the centre of the obligations. Everything else, the verification, the record keeping, the reporting, is described by it. It is also where most agencies get stuck, because writing a compliance document is nobody in real estate's idea of a good week.
AUSTRAC publishes a free starter kit for real estate specifically, which removes the blank page problem. The rest of this page is about what the kit cannot do for you.
What the program has to cover
Your risk assessment
The foundation. What money laundering risk does your agency actually carry, given where you operate, what you sell and who buys it? Everything downstream depends on this, which is why it is the one section that cannot be inherited from a template. There is more on it in the risk assessment guide.
Customer due diligence procedures
Who gets checked, what you collect, how you verify it, and the circumstances that call for enhanced scrutiny rather than standard. This includes how you handle entities rather than individuals, which is where trusts and companies make things harder, and how you screen for politically exposed persons and sanctions.
Governance and the compliance officer
Who is accountable, what they are accountable for, and how senior management stays across it. See the compliance officer guide.
Staff training
What your people need to know and how they learn it. Agents are the ones who meet the client, so they are the ones who notice something is off, and a program that trains nobody is a program that detects nothing.
Record keeping
How the evidence is stored, and for how long. Customer due diligence records are kept for seven years from the end of the business relationship, which is longer than most agencies keep anything and longer than many staff stay.
Reporting
How a suspicion becomes a suspicious matter report, and who submits it. Reporting is its own obligation and sits alongside the due diligence work.
Where templates stop working
A template can carry every section above except one, and it is the one that matters. AUSTRAC does not know your book. It cannot tell you that your Tuesday auctions attract a particular buyer profile, or that a third of your settlements involve offshore purchasers, or that you have started selling a development where deposits arrive from third parties.
The gap that actually causes failures
Most compliance failures are not missing programs. They are programs that exist and are not followed, and that gap is rarely deliberate. The program says do the checks, the week gets busy, a contract gets signed, and afterwards nobody can show what was verified or when.
Which is why the useful question when writing procedures is not whether they are thorough but whether an agent can actually do them on a Saturday between opens. A procedure that is inconvenient quietly stops happening, and then the program becomes a document describing a fiction.
“From today, tens of thousands more businesses are now covered by Australia's anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) laws, including real estate agents, lawyers, conveyancers, accountants, and dealers in precious metals and stones.”
Where to start
Download the starter kit, because it is free and it is written for your sector. Work through the risk assessment with the people who actually deal with clients, since they know things the principal does not. Then write the procedures around how your agency really operates rather than how it would operate in an ideal week.
Our starter kit guide walks through what is inside it.
Common questions
What is an AML/CTF program?
It is the document that sets out how your business identifies and manages its money laundering and terrorism financing risk: who you check, how you check them, what raises the level of scrutiny, who is responsible and how staff are trained. Every reporting entity has to have one.
Can we just use a template?
A template gives you the structure and the standard wording, which is genuinely useful. What it cannot supply is your risk assessment, because that depends on where you operate, what you sell and who buys it. A program that describes a generic agency rather than yours does not do its job.
Does AUSTRAC approve our program?
No. There is no approval or lodgement step for the program itself, and nobody signs it off before you begin operating. You write it, you follow it, and you produce it if AUSTRAC asks to see it. Enrolment is a separate requirement and does not involve any review of your program, so an agency can be correctly enrolled and still have a program that would not survive scrutiny.
How long does an AML/CTF program need to be?
There is no page count, and length is not the measure of a good program. A small agency with a narrow business can have a short one. What matters is that it covers the required areas and genuinely describes how your agency operates, rather than describing a generic business. A long program copied from a template is worth less than a short one written from your own risk assessment, because only the second can actually be followed.
How often does it need reviewing?
It should be reviewed when your business changes in a way that affects risk, such as new markets, new transaction types or new client profiles, and periodically regardless. A program written once and never revisited stops describing the business fairly quickly.
General information about the obligations, not legal advice about your agency.