Have you ever watched the movies Kaalia or Sholay? You must have remembered the jail scenes of both of them. Character Jai, Veeru, Kaalia, and their Cell mates had some unique code to identify each criminal with a number code. In the same way, The government will soon issue a unique code for each individual or company accused of economic crimes, similar to a ‘Qaidi’ number for each prisoner. The identification number will be called a ‘Unique Economic Offender Code’ and will be linked to the offender’s Aadhaar number in the case of an individual or PAN in the case of a company. This one-of-a-kind code will be alpha-numeric and PAN- or Aadhaar-based, allowing businesses and individuals to tag all cases of economic crimes committed against them and have a 360-degree profile. It will be a system-generated code that will appear once the police or any central intelligence or enforcement agency feeds data into the NEOR (National Economic Offence Records)- a central repository, which is currently under construction. The NEOR will be a showcase project for India at its upcoming Financial Action Task Force review, which is scheduled for later this year. A high-level team from the Paris-based inter-governmental watchdog will visit India in the coming months to assess the country’s legislative and enforcement actions against money laundering and terror financing. The NEOR, as previously reported by TOI, is a central repository of all economic offenses that will share data about each economic offender with all central and state intelligence and enforcement agencies. The NEOR is being built on a budget of around ₹ 40 crores, and the Central Economic Intelligence Bureau has been tasked with coordinating and completing the project with the assistance of the National Informatics Centre. NEOR will be completed in the next 4-5 months, and all data from central and state agencies will be migrated to the national repository using API (Application Programming Interface) software, reducing the possibility of manual intervention.

People facing serious money laundering charges, such as escapee Vijay Mallya, P. Chidambaram, Manish Sisodia, Satyendar Jain, Hajra Iqbal Memon, Lalit Modi, Nirav Modi, Mehul Chauksi etc will be assigned a Unique Economic Offender Code. Money laundering is the process of concealing the source of money obtained illegally and converting it to a clean source in order to avoid prosecution, conviction, and confiscation of the criminal funds. It is an illegal transaction that turns black money into white money. Money laundering is a major financial offense. Anti-money laundering measures have grown in importance as a means of preventing and combating such practices.

The finance ministry’s Central Economic Intelligence Bureau has compiled a database of approximately 2.5 lakh economic offenders. The idea behind assigning a unique code to each accused is to quickly launch a multi-agency investigation against them, as opposed to the current practice of waiting for one agency to complete its investigation and file a chargesheet or prosecution complaint before sharing it with others for further investigation.