Chetan Sahu Personal Blog

What is Facilitation payment? A facilitation payment, commonly known as a grease payment or facilitating payment, is defined as a amount paid to a public or government official to expedite work or governmental processes. This type of payment serves to ensure that a task is completed more swiftly or effectively than it would typically occur. For example, a person seeking to register their company with the relevant authority and paid the standard fee required for the registration. The officer accepted the documents, collected the fee, and informed the individual to wait for two weeks. However, since the person needed the registration completed within four days, they decided to pay an additional amount to speed up the process. This extra payment is known as a facilitation payment, while the initial fee paid is simply the standard fee set by the authority. US FCPA vs UK Bribery Act! In the United Kingdom, facilitation payments are classified as bribery and are prohibited by the...

The title may appear unusual without any context, and you might be wondering about it. The reason is that everything I've encountered lately has centered on DD which stands for Due Diligence. A term you might have come across in various contexts. However, I’m here to provide my perspective on due diligence specifically in relation to Anti-Money Laundering (AML).   What exactly is due diligence? Is it merely research focused on a particular topic, or does it involve uncovering elusive details? Due diligence is a blend of the both; it represents a thorough investigation aimed at uncovering factors that could influence a process, a decision, or any significant matter at hand. For compliance professionals, due diligence means gathering and documenting crucial information required by regulatory authorities guidelines. This includes details about the business, key stakeholders, any negative media attention, as well as relevant policies and codes of conduct. Even though thi...

The first signs of tax heaven appeared after World War I in some countries, such as the United States, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, but it was really shaped between 1960-1964 by the British Empire, which is so massive that it can be referred to as the second empire. This blog will not delve into history because it is about compliance. SWISS LAW The Swiss law mandated 'absolute silence in respect to a professional secret', that is, absolute silence in relation to any accounts held in Swiss banks. "absolute" here indicates protection from any government, including the Swiss. JURISDICTIONS To understand how tax heaven work, we will need to understand countries which make it possible I'll list the countries that are recognized to be tax havens or have a high level of privacy. These are countries where it is easier to operate accounts anonymously or with a nominee director, where a corporation can be a corporate director of another company, or where business transac...

A business should be well aware of the importance of completing due diligence on third parties before engaging in any transaction, even if it is for a short period of time. Third-party assessment is now more important than ever due to new regulations and guidelines. These third party poses significant compliance risks, including facilitation payment, bribery, corruption, sanctions, data privacy and more, can be introduced into a company's operation. Some of the regulations that compel businesses to do risk assessments on third party (below list is not exhaustive) German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act US Federal Reserve Guidelines France Sapin II Law Singapore MAS regulation Bank of England policy Every business such as banks, insurance companies, payment businesses, financial institutions etc, must conduct third party due diligence. I believe that in the years to come, we will see more stringent and mandatory guidelines from global and local regulators. So, how can we comply and st...

Ever wonder why simple tasks are difficult to manage? I know you do, and we all do, because we believe that these tasks do not require attention and can be handled easily. Similarly, document management is one of the most uncomplicated activities, but many people struggle to manage it successfully. The statistics speak for themselves: An average employee spends 50% of his time searching for a file and over 21% of employee productivity per day is lost. This is how I feel every time I open a drive or any other document folder. Source: Imgflip The key challenges I had and still facing with the document. Documents are not named appropriately. As the volume increases, it is essential that you keep document with the correct dates and name; otherwise, accessing specific documents would be difficult.  Multiple locations for documents, such as a local drive, a shared drive, personal inbox, and so on. Most of the time, people end up searching for the same documents in five di...

I find this very amusing that every year some or the other way Indian people start trending boycott China, and this time it all started with boycott Chinese apps (i.e. TikTok). But are we doing anything apart from boycotting? Are we focusing on the right things so that we don’t have to trend boycott China every year?       India is notorious when it comes to banning. What is it this year you ask? Indians are going after the Chinese products, particularly TikTok, the number one trending app. Is boycotting the right thing to do?       Let's put this thing in perspective,        "Imagine you are a deer. You have essentially only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise (by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex, nurse a fawn, whatever). There is no real need to do much else. Now imagine you are a human being. Even if you only count the basic things, you have rather more...