The head of Germany’s anti-money laundering authority resigned on Thursday after the government admitted that the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force was kept in the dark about a massive backlog of unprocessed reports of suspicious activity.

Christof Schulte, who had led Germany’s Financial Intelligence Unit since 2018, is the fourth head of a German supervisory body to lose their job since 2021. The heads of financial watchdog BaFin, audit regulator Apas and accounting regulator FREP were all ousted in connection with their authorities’ botched handling of the Wirecard scandal.

Germany’s finance ministry on Thursday informed parliament of Schulte’s departure, adding that his resignation was for “personal reasons”, people familiar with the matter told the Financial Times. The ministry confirmed “the change in personnel” at the FIU to the FT but declined to comment further. A successor has not yet been named.

Over the past months, German media reported that the FIU was sitting on a backlog of more than 100,000 unprocessed suspicious activity reports that had been growing since early 2020. This was at odds with a statement Schulte gave to parliament in February, when he stated that there was no processing delay.

The government acknowledged last week in an answer to a written inquiry by an opposition MP that the FIU did not disclose the backlog to the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental organisation that from November 2021 to June 2022 evaluated Germany’s anti-money laundering controls.

In its evaluation report, which was published in August, the FATF praised “a number of positive steps” taken by Germany “to strengthen the role of the FIU”. It also noted that the country needed to do more to “make sure that there is resourcing and prioritisation at the operational level to combat illicit financial flows.”

The FATF said that “mutual evaluations are a confidential process” but declined to comment further.

The Financial Intelligence Unit has been the target of criticism from politicians for years as it has been slow in dealing with suspicious activity reports that banks are legally required to file if they spot potential evidence of money laundering.

In the years leading to the collapse of Wirecard, which crashed in 2020 in one of Germany’s largest accounting scandals, banks had filed about 30 suspicious activity reports about the disgraced company. However, the FIU only shared this information with criminal prosecutors after Wirecard’s insolvency.

In 2021, the FIU received 300,000 suspicious activity reports, more than twice the previous year’s level. 40,000 of them were passed on to law enforcement authorities. The FIU declined to comment, and Schulte could not immediately be reached by the FT.

Matthias Hauer, an MP for the conservative Christian Democratic Union who uncovered the issue in a written inquiry, lambasted the FIU and the finance ministry for months of “secret-mongering”. “The massive backlog in work was long hidden from parliament and the public,” he said in a statement, adding that the “legal supervision of the finance ministry failed.”

Hauer urged finance minister Christian Lindner, the leader of the pro-business Free Democrats, to take personal ownership of the matter and to fix the structural shortcomings of Germany’s anti-money laundering procedures. Lindner this month rejected plans by the EU to ban the use of cash for purchases of more than €10,000, arguing that the use of cash was a matter of “privacy and data protection”.

Konrad Duffy, a financial crime expert at lobby group Finanzwende, said in a statement that the Financial Intelligence Unit needed a “reboot” that went far beyond its top staff. “Since 2017, there has been a constant string of problems that have not been addressed,” he said.