Legal persons, particularly businesses, engage in a wide variety of transactions with a wide range of counterparts. Depending on its size and the nature of its business, a legal person customer might be likely to send and receive far larger and more irregular transfers than would an individual—many of them with counterparties that are also legal persons. For example, a company that manufactures for export may send payments to suppliers in a number of foreign jurisdictions, and receive payments from purchasers in different jurisdictions.

The variety and unpredictability of transactions carried out by legal persons can make it more difficult to identify behaviour that is unusual or has no obvious economic purpose. This is especially true when the counterparts are also opaque legal persons or arrangements. For example, a company may seek to reduce its tax burden by claiming that certain transfers are tax-deductible expenses, when in reality they are payments to a legal person with the same beneficial owners as the originating company.