Treasury moves to give FIC sweeping new lifestyle-audit powers

Stephen Grootes speaks to Pieter Smit, Acting Director of the Financial Intelligence Centre and Steven Powell, ENS’s head of forensics about National Treasury’s fast-tracked General Laws Amendment Bill that would give the FIC explicit authority to conduct lifestyle audits.

Listen to the interview in the audio player below.

National Treasury wants to give the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) new powers to investigate people whose lifestyles don’t seem to match what they earn on paper.

The proposal forms part of the General Laws (Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Terrorism Financing) Amendment Bill of 2025, which would allow the FIC to conduct so-called lifestyle audits.

The aim is to uncover hidden income, unexplained wealth, tax evasion and corruption.

In simple terms, the government wants to check whether someone’s spending makes sense when compared with their declared income.

If enacted, these powers would enable the FIC to proactively identify and drill down on suspected money-laundering and illicit financial flows by accessing public databases and sharing data with other agencies.

The amended laws will hopefully strengthen South Africa’s ability to uncover hidden funds and enforce anti-money-laundering laws.

Speaking to Stephen Grootes on The Money Show, Steven Powell, head of forensics at ENS says this now gives the state the powers to proactively investigate their suspicions of money laundering. 

"You'd recall from the grey-listing, one of the criticism by the FATF was that South Africa is not doing enough proactively to identify and investigate money laundering. So this essentially is designed to cure that criticism."

- Steven Powell, head of forensics - ENS

"A lifestyle audit is a red flag audit. It's not evidence before a court of law, it just signifies someone is potentially living beyond their means, and then those bodies will have to do some investigation. Nobody is going to be prosecuted, either in the disciplinary process or in the criminal court, unless the state have the ability to prove whatever concerns there are that emanate from the lifestyle audit "

- Steven Powell, head of forensics - ENS

"A lot of the criminals that we investigate as a forensic unit are already making an extensive use of crypto and other platforms to try and evade scrutiny."

- Steven Powell, head of forensics - ENS

Scroll to the top of the article to listen to the full interview.