Divergent Anti-money laundering Regulatory Architectures for Accounting Professionals: A Comparative Study between China and Ireland

Abstract

This article compares the AML regulatory architectures governing accounting professionals in China and Ireland, a comparison made possible by China’s 2025 Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Law, which extends regulation to accounting firms. It asks under what conditions criminal liability for AML failures can be activated. Treating regulatory architecture as three tiers the supervisory model, operational obligations, and the criminal liability regime it finds a structural asymmetry. In Ireland, accountants are supervised under a self-regulatory model that channels breaches toward internal discipline rather than criminal referral. The standalone offences, despite their low threshold, are therefore not activated a constraint that is relational, lying not in the offences but in the supervisory model surrounding them. In China, the absence of standalone AML offences means such failures are pursued under Article 191 of the Criminal Code as money laundering by omission, whose causation requirement is doctrinally hard to satisfy for procedural breaches; the constraint is inherent in the criminal liability regime. Both regimes are thus left without activation, by opposite routes. Addressing this requires, in Ireland, a referral mechanism linking the disciplinary process to criminal investigation; and in China, a standalone offence for AML failures that does not require proof of a laundering outcome.