The decision is the government's first response to a report commissioned by the Home Office and written by consultants KPMG, which sets out the weaknesses of the current system.

At present, KPMG says, there is a backlog of 58,000 so-called "Suspicious Activity Reports" (SARs) filed by banks, building societies, lawyers, accountants and others, and the systems currently in place to handle them remain largely paper-based.

SARs sent to the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) are usually the first stage in the investigation of money laundering and other forms of financial crime.

One urban police force has used SARs in eight recent cases producing seizures totalling �71m.

A Home Office spokeswoman told BBC News Online that while there was no firm timescale to set up the task force, the aim was to have it up and running as soon as possible.

The three-fold surge in reporting since 9/11 has been a huge challenge... and the KPMG report ably demonstrates a way forward Vincent Harvey, NCIS Director of Economic Crime

KPMG's own recommended timescale calls for the task force to start work within the next three months, and for it to report by the end of next year.

Upgrades to the systems which handle SARs, the report says, should be completed in six to twelve months, including making electronic reporting compulsory for financial institutions, lawyers and accountants.

Workload

KPMG's report follows hard on the heels of the upgrading, two weeks ago, of the international rules for hunting dirty money.

The rules, drawn up by the Paris-based 30-member Financial Action Task Force, call for a much greater effort from lawyers, accountants and more informal money-handling groups such as jewellers, casinos and auction houses to report suspicious transactions.

Even without this additional workload, NCIS's task in handling SARs has grown immensely in the past two years, as a result of the high priority assigned to disrupting financial crime since the 9/11 attacks.

The organisation says it expects to handle more than 100,000 this year, and is aiming to introduce better targeting which should allow it to manage the workload more effectively.

"The three-fold surge in reporting since 11 September 2001 has been a huge challenge for the system, and the KPMG report ably demonstrates a way forward," said Vincent Harvey, NCIS's Director of Economic Crime.

But the size of the task to date has triggered the backlog cited by KPMG, and now means that delays of up to 90 days apply in some cases, according to private-sector experts.

The task is complicated by the fact that police forces up and down the country have limited resources for white-collar crime, since government priorities require them to focus on street crime and other offences.

One of KPMG's other recommendations is that law enforcement agencies should from now on be judged on how they handle money laundering, besides the existing yardsticks which tend to focus more on robbery and violence.