Its mission is to set international standards to ensure national authorities can effectively go after illicit funds linked to serious crimes.

These are the Financial Action Task Force recommendations.

They're not laws, right? They're what we call an international relations soft law.

So, there's no enforcement mechanism, right? It's not like there's some global police that can bust you and put you in handcuffs and take you away to global jail.

That doesn't happen.

But what they do have is the ability to set expectations, and there's lots of international standards.

They're voluminous.

Nielsen, along with fellow researchers Michael Findley and Jason Scharman, conducted a massive experiment to learn where this recommendation was and was not being followed.