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New anti-money laundering regulations planned by the Treasury would impose “disproportionate and unnecessary” burdens on law firms, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has warned. It was particularly unhappy about a ‘criminality test’ for lawyers.

A solicitor who transferred nearly £1.3m to an offshore bank account in Belize has been suspended for a year for breaches of the money laundering regulations and accounts rules. A disciplinary tribunal said she have have unwittingly facilitated the movement of monies during the course of a suspected fraud.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has published a blueprint for simplifying its system for granting waivers to regulations in order to promote innovation, which it suggests will particularly benefit small firms. The new policy would guarantee no enforcement action would be taken if innovations create technical breaches of the rules.

Reactions from key legal services industry bodies to the Legal Services Board’s blueprint for radical form of legal regulation have ranged from enthusiastic welcome to anger at its timing, while the politician who introduced the Legal Services Act 2007 said tackling unmet legal need was more of a priority.

The Law Society has issued a damning critique of the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s proposals for a streamlined code of conduct and – to a lesser extent – its planned overhaul of the accounts rules. The code of conduct proposals were misconceived, unnecessary, unclear, and would create a two-tier profession, it said.