An amendment to the Money Laundering Control Act (洗錢防制法) was passed by the Legislative Yuan on Friday, widening the scope of professions required to report any suspicious financial transaction by their clients to the authorities.
According to the amendment, in addition to financial institutions, jewelers, land registration agents, real-estate brokers, lawyers and accountants must report suspicious transactions.
If any of their clients are found to have been involved in money laundering and they are found to have failed to report them to the Investigation Bureau, they can be fined up to NT$1 million (US$31,387).
The amendment also stipulates that any financial institution that avoids, refuses to comply or interferes with inspections looking into possible acts of money laundering may be punished with a fine ranging from NT$500,000 to NT$5 million.
The amendment would come into force in June next year at the earliest, the Legislative Yuan said.
Also on Friday, the legislature cleared an amendment that requires international e-commerce operators to pay business tax in Taiwan.
According to the amendment to the Value-added and Non-Value-added Business Tax Act (加值型及非加值型營業稅法修正案), international e-commerce companies must register their presence with the tax authorities or face a fine of up to NT$30,000.
Companies that fail to file their tax returns may also be fined up to NT$30,000, according to the amendment.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Tseng Ming-chung (曾銘宗) said the amendment would close a loophole that allows international e-commerce companies, such as Google, to not pay taxes in Taiwan.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater