What does the Benefitax money laundering check mean?
If you want to become a client of Benefitax and the first questions regarding the potential scope of service have been answered to the satisfaction of all parties involved, we must comply with the legal requirements imposed on us by the German legislator and the EU. On the one hand, for liability reasons, we will only work for new clients once we have a signed mandate agreement/limitation of liability. Secondly, we must check potential clients in accordance with the Money Laundering Act (GWG). To do this, we first send them a questionnaire and ask them to complete it and return it with the required documents. For private clients, this is usually a scan of a valid ID document. For companies, we need a little more:
- A current excerpt from a commercial register (or similar)
- Certificate of incorporation
- Scan of the valid ID of the legal representative of the company. Please note: this person must also be entered in the register as authorized to sign or have a power of attorney from a person entered in the register. If, according to the register, only several persons may sign together, this must be observed.
- Overview of the holding structure with details of the percentage shareholding in order to determine the beneficial owner
The questionnaire essentially deals with the following points:
- Who is the client (name, registration number, registered address)
- Who is the legal representative?
- Who are the beneficial owners?
- Are there other persons besides the beneficial owners who have an influence on the client?
- Are there other factors that could lead to us having increased due diligence obligations for this mandate, e.g. the origin from an unsafe third country?
After receiving the documents, we check the entries for plausibility and research some information ourselves:
- We check whether the legal representative or the client is a PEP (politically exposed person), for whom we are subject to increased due diligence obligations.
- We check whether the information on the beneficial owner from the questionnaire matches the information in the German Transparency Register (only applies to German companies)
- We assess the money laundering risk of the new potential client on the basis of the documents and information available to us using a checklist.
If there are any discrepancies or missing information, we will return the questionnaire and explain what is still missing.
We also identify our new clients or their legal representatives at our office or in a brief meeting via Teams. This only takes 5 minutes. We make sure that the person and ID scan match.
Once the identification process has also been completed, we draw up a mandate agreement based on the information we have received from the potential clients and on which we have exchanged information. We send this to them for signature together with the necessary powers of attorney and data protection notices. Once we have received the signed documents, we can start working for them.