The Home Office has launched a Call for Evidence exploring ways to improve information sharing in order to tackle economic crime.

Already, a number of measures have been introduced to encourage information sharing, including the Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) provisions in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and Terrorism Act 2000, and the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (which we recently discussed here in relation to the publication of new guidance).

The Call for Evidence acknowledges that despite these developments, “the UK’s economic crime information sharing system remains a complex patchwork of general frameworks and more targeted information sharing gateways. While these mechanisms enable information sharing in principle, in practice they are often underutilised or inconsistently applied”.

Three reasons are identified for this state of affairs:

1. A fragmented and vast set of rules and regulations that is complex, time-consuming to operate, and can be inefficient as organisations “build up reactive behaviours like overcompliance and defensive reporting”.

2. Operational challenges which mean that organisations are unable to assess the value of the information they hold, or whether it can be shared given data protection concerns.

3. Loss of confidence in using existing mechanisms, driven by fears of breaching privacy, reputational harm, regulatory scrutiny, and litigation.

The Call for Evidence aims to understand these problems in greater detail (as well as to unearth any others) as the first step in a wider plan to “reform the UK’s information-sharing framework for economic crime, to inform future policy development and make any required improvements to the legal and operational framework for economic crime information sharing”. It covers all aspects of information sharing, from public-public, private-private, private-public, and cross-border, asking organisations in each case to describe their experience with the existing system, where problems lie, and how improvements can be made with the use of new technology.

The Call for Evidence closes on 18 May 2026, and can be found here.