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Money laundering in ecuador: Profile of the involved person and the socio-economic impact

Abstract:

Money Laundering constitutes a serious socio-economic problem that involves people from different social levels, who try to mask, as legal, the money that comes from illegal activities, generally related to drug dealing, illegal selling of guns, human trafficking, and others. Several institutions, with social purposes, are pursuing mechanisms to prevent and fight these types of crime form different edges. The present research analyzes the profiles of the involved people regarding money laundering in Ecuador, during the years 2006-2014, and the impact provoked from a social-economic point of view at national level. The present project provides with general guidelines regarding the people involved and the operation methods. This information might guide to the creation of controls, which minimize the execution of this type of crime, especially in activities related to business environment, where an accountant is in exercise of his profession, and whose ethics depend on the majority of the economic and financial processes. The applied methodology is based on the extraction of qualitative and quantitative variables of the verdicts emitted in Ecuador, from 2006 to 2014, and published by the Financial Action Task Force of Latin America (its Spanish acronym GAFILAT) for its descriptive analysis and hypothesis tests. Through the attained results, it can be observed that the implied people, regarding money laundering, are mainly foreign males. Under this type of crime, the men are the ones who enter a higher amount of money to the country; approximately 42 times more than the women. The money enters the country through international flights, and in some reported cases, the involved people have been arrested at the airport. The money that circulates thanks to money laundering is about 2.5 to 6.3% of the PIB in Latin America, and the purchases made to ghost companies, according to the Internal Revenue Service (SRI standing by the acronym in Spanish) in Ecuador, get to $200,000 approximately.