Purpose of Mutual Evaluations

In accordance with internationally established practice for evaluating compliance with the FATF 40+9 Recommendations, APG members are committed to a mutual peer review system referred to as mutual evaluations.

A mutual evaluation involves a two week on-site visit to the APG member by a team of experts organized by the Secretariat from other APG members and includes:

• legal experts;
• financial and regulatory experts; and 
• law enforcement experts.

To qualify as an expert, delegates from APG members must undertake and succesfully complete a training course in the FATF 2004 Methodology prior to the on-site visit.

Procedure

While details may vary, the entire mutual evaluation includes the following steps:

• prior to the on-site visit, the member to be evaluated is required to complete a standard APG Mutual Evaluation Questionnaire (MEQ) based on the internationally agreed AML/CFT Assessment Methodology;
• the completed MEQ is then provided to the Evaluation Team;
• the on-site visit is conducted over approximately two weeks and involves a series of face-to-face meetings with relevant government agencies and representatives from the financial sector; 
• following the onsite visit, a draft mutual evaluation report is prepared by the Evaluation Team and is sent to the assessed member for its written comments and response;
• the Evaluation Team then decides whether the draft report should be amended in the light of comments received;
• the APG Secretariat sends the revised draft Mutual Evaluation report to the member and the report is also circulated to APG members prior to the next APG Annual Meeting;
• the content, including recommendations and compliance ratings in the report are considered by the entire APG membership during the Annual Meeting with a presentation by the evaluators, a response by the evaluated member, pre-selected 'intervenor' questions followed by general discussion;
• the report is then proposed for adoption;
• once adopted the report is published in accordance with APG policy on the APG website. 

In conducting mutual evaluations the APG follows standard procedures, a copy of which is posted to the documents section of this website.

Publication of Mutual Evaluation Reports

Prior to 2007, assessed APG members were strongly encouraged to publish their reports. At the 2007 Annual Meeting, the membership agreed to a rule requiring all members to automatically publish their reports.  Reports adopted prior to 2007 may not necessarily be publicly available.  

Planned evaluations

The schedule of mutual evaluations for all APG members in the second round (2005 – 2011) is contained in this section. Click on the button to the left.

 Self Assessment Exercises

The globally agreed AML/CFT Standard Assessment Methodology 2004 provides a tool for APG members to conduct self assessment with compliance against the FATF 40 + 9 Recommendations.

An earlier self assessment questionnaire tool was available to test compliance with the 1996 FATF 40 Recommendations, prior to the significant revision of the FATF Standards in 2003. The APG conducted its first self-assessment exercise using that earlier tool in 1998 - 99 and completed its second exercise for 2000 - 2002 in the second half of 2002.