A group of financial crime and tax fraud investigators from five allied countries — the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and the Netherlands — also known as the J5, are aiming to increase collaboration with the banking sector.

The J5, officially the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement, was established by the five governments in July 2018, and "handpicked" investigators from authorities in each country have been working together since, John Fort, the head of criminal investigations at the Internal Revenue Service of the United States, said at a London conference Nov. 12.

"I will ask my special agents who are in charge of the field office to engage more particularly with the banking community," said Fort. "This is something that I am pushing a lot more this year," he said, highlighting that bankers, particularly in the U.S., have complained to the government that they often do not understand what information they are expected to provide to help criminal investigations.

"We haven’t always embraced working collaboratively with our private partners," Fort said. "We are trying to build that up a lot more, trying to stress it a lot more, working with the banking community and others to share information."

Speaking at the same conference, Simon York, the director of fraud investigations at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, or HMRC, the U.K.’s tax authority, said collaboration may result in identifying targets suspected of committing crimes.

"We have made some real progress. We have been working together to gather information, to share specific operations intelligence and to conduct joint operational activity," York said.

"The intended outcome of this collaboration will see the J5 enhancing existing investigations, intelligence programs, identifying significant new targets for investigation."

York warned that criminal conspiracies are becoming "increasingly complex" and are exploiting the globalized financial system to transfer large amounts of money undetected.

In the U.K., banks are already working closely with the authorities under the Joint Money Laundering Intelligence Taskforce, or JMLIT, and the J5 will seek to expand on this collaboration, said York.

At the same time, the U.K. is now able to sanction those banks which do not do enough to stop financial crime, by using a newly created law that criminalizes companies, not just their employees, York warned.

"Companies remain liable unless they show that reasonable preventative procedures have been in place, or that it wasn’t reasonable to have procedures in place," he said.