The Asset Recovery Agency (ARA) was set up in February 2003 in a blaze of publicity. The objectives of this agency have been set up in the Proceed of Crime Act 2002, with a mandate to extend the limited government provisions for confiscating the proceeds of crime.
In the first three years of its operations, the ARA was faced with many challenges in meeting most of its targets. The agency recovered at least £23 million within the first three years of service, spending £65 million in the process.
Now, this ARA is dissolved. If you need legal consultation related to asset recovery, you can consult specialised civil fraud lawyers and asset recovery solicitors in the UK.
The ARA initiative
When ARA was established in 2003, it was mandated to recover assets from all proceeds of crime. This would include even in situations where the owners had not been convicted of a crime. The agency could use criminal confiscation to recover assets from convicted criminals and prepare taxation.
It would use the same method to prepare taxation estimates for criminal income. No agency was tasked with recovering criminal assets before the inception of the ARA.
The ARA would remove property obtained by criminal activity by tackling small and larger criminals to reduce the money available for further crime. In the 2002 Act, the agency was responsible for promoting the investigation of the crime by training, monitoring, and accreditation of financial investigations.
The challenges of the ARA
The UK government has been in the limelight since 1970 with initiatives that tackle the financial assets from crime.
The government has taken a lot of actions to address cash forfeiture, confiscation, and money laundering.
After the government could not recover funds in 1978 from Operation Julie, a drug trafficking case, the confiscation powers were introduced. The UK introduced the confiscation regime by the Drug Trafficking Offences Act 1986. Most of the legislation was amended over time. However, there was a challenge in the existing asset recovery arrangement.
Public Impact of ARA
The ARA was eventually dissolved because it did not present improvement in criminal asset recovery. The agency fell short of its targets and was found to operate with a range of inefficiencies which were not sustainable.
According to a report published by the National Audit Office (NAO) in 2007, half of all the ARA cases in 2003 and 2004 were still under review in 2006. The report also shows that the ARA failed in achieving its targets for the recovery of criminal assets.
As of 2017, the ARA had spent close to £65 million recovering assets of £23 million. The agency expects to be independent and self-financing, but its underperformance is something that puts it down.
There was no retention of the agency’s monitoring staff. The agency had trained close to 4,500 Financial Investigations, at almost £700 per place. As of summer 2006, the agency had only assigned 1,400 of the trained staff active roles.
According to the report, there was uncertainty about the number of accredited status of financial investigations that it trained. At least 90% of the trained staff at ARA had not completed the Continuous Professional Development (CPD) required to retain accreditation.
The report also affirms that the ARA could not investigate cases, and therefore was reliant on referrals from the partners organisations. However, most of the government bodies would not make the referrals. Only 20% of the 700 bodies which should refer their cases to their ARA could not do so.
Final Thoughts
There is more to learn about the rise and fall of the ARA. The Asset Recovery Agency (ARA) has been through many challenges, and in this article, we have just mentioned a few.