Official sources have confirmed to The Indian Express that Ernst & Young have entered into a two-year contract, valued around Rs 2 crore, with the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to set up and implement a computerised system which records and analyses all ‘‘suspicious’’ financial transactions.

The need for a computerised data analyser, the sources said, stemmed from the fact that the FIU has already received 18 lakh Cash Transaction Reports (CTRs) and 650 Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) from 40,000 ‘‘reporting entities’’.

Two years ago, the FIU was set up as the nodal agency for receiving, processing, analysing and disseminating information relating to suspicious transactions.

Under provisions of the 2002 Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), all financial institutions, banks and intermediaries like merchant bankers, foreign institutional investors and stock brokers are required to submit CTRs and STRs of ‘‘suspicious’’ transactions above Rs 10 lakh in Indian or foreign currency.

The Ministry of Finance has cleared the selection of Ernst & Young. It was chosen two weeks ago from a host of top firms like KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, IBM and Infosys.

Ernst & Young will also be involved with the FIU in selection of the vendor and technological upgrades, estimated to cost Rs 10 crore.

Senior FIU officials told The Indian Express that with compliance of ‘‘reporting entities’’ increasing every day and CTRs/ STRs piling up, the task of tracking money laundering and terror financing was becoming a daunting exercise. The Government, officials said, needed to adopt global standards to scrutinise and map all transactions in the ‘‘suspicious’’ category.

With their data warehousing systems in place, the FIU hopes to map patterns of money laundering and terror financing and issue immediate alerts to enforcement and intelligence agencies. In the last few months, several CTRs and STRs received by the FIU have been forwarded to these agencies, resulting in cases being registered under the PMLA or exposing terror finance trails.