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Wired West: Volume 11, no. 3

Offshore Alert Financial Due Diligence Conference (Fort Lauderdale, Florida: April 13 - 15, 2008)

By Anne O'Shea

In April I traveled to Fort Lauderdale to attend the 6th annual Offshore Alert Financial Due Diligence Conference. Attended by industry participants and regulatory agencies around the world, this conference focuses on best practices and legal developments in due diligence research. For regulatory agencies such as the British Columbia Securities Commission, accessing information from offshore jurisdictions with privacy provisions can be a slow and frustrating process. I attended with the hope of learning more about the various sources and legal avenues we might use to locate information about companies and individuals of interest to our enforcement division.

The session was broken into three tracks - Offshore A-Z, Compliance 101 (practical tools for due diligence and compliance activities), and Jurisdictions 360 (sessions on the industry and regulation in a variety of offshore jurisdictions). As is my habit at conferences, I jumped around to the sessions most relevant to my position. As an Information Specialist at BCSC, I work on a number of research projects related to enforcement, which can include digging up information about corporate affiliations, regulatory infractions, lawsuits, bankruptcies, assets and more. As a result the following sessions were among my favourites:

• How to legally obtain information in offshore financial centres
• Offshore investigations: warning signs that an offshore entity might be involved in illegal activity
• The use of international bankruptcy proceedings as an international asset recovery tool
• How to reduce false positives when screening clients against data
• Your KYC (know your client) was fine but your client is not: What to do now?
• How to bust an offshore trust
  

There were a number of interesting debates at the conference, including over how to best regulate the financial services industries in the US, and whether offshore jurisdictions are an efficient mechanism to push "onshore" jurisdictions to do business in a more efficient manner.

One of the most interesting aspects of this conference for me was that I was the only librarian in attendance. At first, I felt a little like a fish out of water, but it soon became apparent that the content was a good match to our profession. Topics such as research tools, search strategies, recall issues, false positives, how to manage results, were very familiar. Unfortunately many of them were covered in a very basic manner, which confirmed my belief that due diligence and compliance-related research are areas in which information professionals can bring great value.

Anne O'Shea is the Editor of Wired West, and an Information Specialist at the British Columbia Securities Commission. .

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