Deficiencies in the UK's anti-money-laundering supervisory regime came to the fore in 2015 when HM Government looked into the matter. To combat these, it is setting up the Office for Professional Body Anti-Money Laundering Supervision.

Here are five things you ought to know about OPBAS:

• the new body aims to improve standards of supervision and make sure that supervisors and law enforcers work together more effectively;
• it also aims to impose consistent standards (and high ones, according to the Government) throughout the UK's AML regime, while imposing the least burden possible on legitimate business;
• it will be housed at the Financial Conduct Authority and follow the regulator's rules of governance;
• it will fund itself by levying a charge on "professional body AML supervisors," as the Government calls them, and this will be enshrined in law by the end of this year and operational by the start of next year;
• finally, it will set out the ways in which professional body AML supervisors should comply with their obligations to the new Money Laundering Regulations and ensure that they do so, exercising powers to penalise them if they contravene those regulations.

According to HM Treasury, the Government took a meagre £255 million from criminals in 2015/16, so there is plenty of room for improvement.

In a consultative paper (CP 17/35) the FCA has now made some suggestions proposals for a structure of fees for recovering the costs of OPBAS from professional body supervisors. The powers given to it by the OPBAS regulations to recover its costs fall outside the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and therefore operate under a different regime. As with the usual regime of 'fees' (the name the FCA gives to its levies on firms), however, payments from the professional bodies to the FCA will be on an on-account basis after the first year. The comment period closes on 8 January.