The Financial Intelligence Centre Amendment Bill currently winding its way through the National Assembly should have little impact on the ICT industry and the corporate IT department, lawyers say.
The Law Society and other interest groups have complained that the Bill, recently approved by the National Assembly's finance committee, will impose onerous new obligations on the legal profession and business.
ICT lawyer Mike Silber says any law that increases compliance obligations puts additional pressure on systems implemented for such compliance. "Now those could be manual systems, but in most cases are electronic - which means reviewing the existing system and amending, upgrading or replacing if necessary. In most cases, it won't be necessary, but I still suspect a minor spending increase."
He adds, since the amendment Bill substantially increases penalties for non-compliance, "something that was too expensive before is now affordable in the face of a R500 000 fine".
Silber's colleague at the Michalson's ICT law practice, Helaine Leggat, says the Bill raises "all the usual ICT law issues". In the end, the Bill "merely increases the burden on organisations to know what they have - and where - over what the vendors call the 'entire information lifecycle'".
Leggat also advises that companies take greater care with the classification of information. She notes that different laws set different standards and these are not always heeded at many companies.
"These are all issues that apply to running a business every day. It just places an added burden on the accountable institutions to manage records very carefully and have all the procedures, technologies, guidelines and policies in place to do so, especially banks, attorneys and accounting firms."
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