Auditor-General flags concerns over FinTRAC’s long delays to share financial intelligence

Canada’s anti-money-laundering agency is taking too long to produce financial intelligence and overseeing too many businesses to effectively monitor their compliance with the country’s financial crime laws, according to a new report from the federal spending watchdog.

Between January, 2023, and June, 2025, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FinTRAC) took an average of 112 days, or nearly four months, to produce and distribute financial intelligence when law enforcement flagged a concern, according to the report published Thursday by Auditor-General Karen Hogan.

The Auditor-General’s report attributed the delay partly to weaknesses in FinTRAC’s information technology system, noting that some of its processes are still carried out manually and that analysts are sometimes duplicating work that isn’t being stored in a centralized system for use by other analysts.

“Timeliness is critical for financial intelligence to maximize its impact. Financial transactions are completed in moments, and illicit actors often move money quickly across accounts and jurisdictions,” the report states, noting that half of the recipients surveyed by the Auditor-General said they received FinTRAC’s disclosures too late to be useful.

“When financial intelligence takes a long time to be developed and shared, there are greater risks that illicit funds may already be laundered, withdrawn, or converted, limiting the ability to freeze assets, stop transfers, or identify new leads,” the Auditor-General wrote.

The report follows a recently completed review of Canada’s anti-money-laundering regime by the Financial Action Task Force, a global financial watchdog that gave the country a passing grade but identified a number of weaknesses as well, including the country’s investigation and prosecution of complex money laundering cases and its supervision of riskier sectors.

The Auditor-General found that as the number of registered businesses under FinTRAC’s supervision has ballooned, the watchdog has started performing more “light-touch” and automated assessments.

“While quicker, these assessments provided FINTRAC with a lower level of assurance that businesses were complying with anti-money laundering laws and regulations, compared with more thorough and resource-intensive examinations,” the report states.

FinTRAC said in a statement that it has processes in place to produce financial intelligence on an urgent basis, and that it works closely with law-enforcement agencies to determine the level of urgency. The centre said the FATF review found that it “can provide financial intelligence disclosures to law enforcement quickly when the information is assessed as urgent.”

The FATF found that 40 per cent of the cases assessed as urgent resulted in a disclosure in less than 10 days, while the remaining 60 per cent took between 11 and 30 days, FinTRAC said.

The agency added that a $37-million increase to its supervisory resources over the next two years will allow it to strengthen its oversight of the 38,000 businesses subject to the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act.

“FINTRAC is committed to leveraging the recommendations of the Office of the Auditor-General of Canada and those of the FATF evaluation to continue to evolve and strengthen the effectiveness of its supervision of businesses and production of financial intelligence,” the statement said.

The report also found that FinTRAC has struggled to resolve a backlog of registration, renewal and other requests from money services businesses, a category that includes cryptocurrency exchanges, two years after a cyberattack forced it to take its registration system offline.

The watchdog relied on a manual process while it worked to develop a replacement system, and about 2,500 requests were still awaiting processing at the time of publication of the Auditor-General’s report.