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Hell hath no fury...

...like a divorcing couple and their lawyers. In a recent case, the wife told her solicitor that she wanted half of everything, including the offshore bank account that her husband hadn't told the authorities about. The lawyers realised that helping to carve up possibly illegal money would make them party to money-laundering, and they had to go to court to ask a judge for instructions. The judge said that they should report the situation to the National Criminal Intelligence Service, in spite of the tradition of legal privilege which protects confidentiality.

New rules on money laundering come into force on 1 March, and it's likely that we will see more and more cases of this sort. Professionals are required to report any suspicion that the proceeds of crime - including tax evasion, as well as every other sort - are being "laundered" (generally moved around so that they appear to come from a legitimate source). The National Criminal Intelligence Service is likely to be swamped with reports, because the penalties for failing to report are severe - the professional could go to jail, even if there was no crime in the first place (we can only hope that this is sufficiently ridiculous to be unlikely, but it appears to be the law).

For the future, then, it will be about as wise to joke about tax evasion to your accountant as it is to say you have a bomb in your luggage when passing through airport security. Some things aren't funny any more.