Comparing Sovereign Debt Rating consistency with Sovereign AML Rating Accuracy

Many stakeholders in the global anti-money laundering (AML) space, including correspondent banks, rely upon explicit or de facto AML sovereign rating services. This reliance is similar to that reposed by fixed income investors in sovereign debt ratings.In this paper we demonstrate that sovereign debt rating agencies provide highly consistent and reasonably accurate ratings. Sovereign AML ratings, by contrast, are usually inconsistent and lack any empirical basis to judge their accuracy. Users of sovereign AML ratings are therefore cautioned that, whatever value they place upon these ratings, they are unreliable measures of the actual incidence of money laundering in any given jurisdiction