As of mid-2026

FINTRAC's Most Wanted

Failure to comply with a ministerial directive

Welcome back to FINTRAC's Most Wanted. A breakdown of FINTRAC's most common monetary penalties.

Since last year, three companies were hit with: Failure to comply with a ministerial directive.

Now, what does that mean in plain English? That means the government said, "don't touch money from this specific place or person," and someone did it anyway.

So how does this even happen? Usually it's not a CAMLO sitting at their desk deciding to send money to North Korea, it's a gap in the screening system.

So if your sanctions list isn't being updated in near real-time or if your transaction monitoring system doesn't account for specific geographic "no-go zones" a dirty transaction can slip through the cracks before you even see it.

And this happens more often than you would think.

And by then, the damage is already done and you've opened yourself up to a fine.

At Rhizome we build these no-go zones directly into your ruleset.

We have automated rules that flag any attempt to send money to North Korea or sanctioned Russian oligarchs or anything like that.

If there's any high risk jurisdictions that are defined by ministerial directives we can represent those with rules we'll raise an alert for you to take a closer look at transactions to countries that are on a predefined "grey list" (FATF, etc.) or you can define your own rules down to a postal code level.

One of the goals of a real-time payments systems is to stop a transaction from going out before it happens.

So let us help you put a stop to something that shouldn't go out!

Reach out to us to see how we can help with the rest of your compliance program.