Windfalls in Canada are tax-free so I just deposit it, report it as gambling winnings and I’m off to the tropics to buy my new house.
That’s more than enough money to take care of friends and family and still travel for the rest of my life. I’m a happy girl.
I’d include getting a 1099 in the wish as well as it being 100 million after taxes.
Is it illegal for genies to create cash for me? I’ll bet that there’s no law against it. I’d just drag it to the bank and deposit it and say a genie gave it to me. They have to prove illegality, and they can’t, so I wouldn’t really try to hide it.
I think you need to change the wish. You could ask for the winning Powerball numbers for the next year and wait until the prize is 200-300 million dollars to play. But even winning the lottery is too public. So instead, you could wish that some billionaire (Bill Gates, one of the Koch brothers, Warren Buffett) decides to gift you $100 million (or more). That can be done without any publicity whatsoever.
The wish stands as written-no modifications, additions or subtractions.
Claw desperately for air?
Well, let us explore that a bit. What does it mean to create a pile of cash? Isn’t this just a case of creating really, really good counterfeit notes? Do the bills have previously unused serial numbers? Or will there now be duplicate serial numbers out in the wild?
Either way, what happens when you try deposit this? Does the bank attempt to verify that the cash is authentic? Will they check serial numbers with the Federal Reserve, who will tell them something like “uh, we never printed that” or “uh, we sent that to Bank X, who told us it is still sitting in their vault”. Would that be enough to get a counterfeiting charge or conviction, despite there being no evidence of an actual counterfeiting operation? Is it realistic to expect you’d end up keeping this cash, after the Federal Reserve shows it either didn’t print it or they are duplicates?
So many questions! My head hurts, trying to reconcile this crash of magic against reality!
Would it be illegal to NOT report it?
Let’s say I put it in my attic, and let the end of the tax year tick by. Have I committed a crime the same as if I won it at a casino or earned it under the table and didn’t report it?
As long as it’s legal there is no way I’d want to report that and pay ~40 million to the government for nothing.
You could leave the country immediately and denounce citizenship to avoid paying, probably. That would most likely require being vague about when you got the money exactly.
If you were willing to keep working and didn’t want to spend huge dollar amounts of it on large assets it would be rather easy to hide it. Just save every penny you earn legally at your job and spend as much as you care to using cash for everything. Travel often and blow lots of money travelling. If you need to declare some money, say to buy a house or something you could just say you won it gambling and pay taxes on it to “clean” it.
I’d go to Vegas and the Caribbean a lot.
Why not just tell the IRS a genie granted you a wish and gave it to you? Wouldn’t they have to prove otherwise? They’d have a hard time proving anything otherwise with me, since I don’t know anybody or go anywhere. I think they’d be pretty happy with whatever their percentage would be, and I’d have all the rest to spend as I pleased. I’d just haul it all into the tiny little savings bank in the nearby town where I keep my miserly savings and deposit it.
There’s no reason the neighbors, etc., would have any reason to ask where I get my money, so that’s a non-issue. I’d be sharing it with my family (only the ones I know personally), so I doubt they’d have any complaints.
I’d like it all to go to sick donkeys, please.
Well, I was thinking about buying a car wash, and now that I have these “gambling winnings”…
I’d stash the cash in a storage locker, concealed in a number of trunks and duffels. I’d take $500,000 or so in cash to facilitate hiring a private plane to fly me and the cash to somewhere with loose banking laws, like the Cayman Islands. Set up a couple of off-shore accounts, transfer the money around a bit, then depart these shores for someplace sunny. Screw the IRS.
Can I wish instead that the money be added to a Swiss bank account created in my name? I don’t want to have to deal with that much cash (Breaking Bad has taught me that, if nothing else).
It’s a gift, it’s non-taxable. Trying to hide or conceal it, bringing it slowly in would likely be considered Money Laundering.
Just bring it to the bank, deposit it. If the IRS has questions, hire a really good tax attorney.
But anything else shows intent and likely would get you at least a structuring charge.
“leaving the country immediately and denounce citizenship to avoid paying” wouldn’t work legally.
I would just package it up inn boxes in my attic, and then deposit a “paycheck” of $1,000 or so twice a month. I don’t think it would be that weird to my local bank, where I’ve had accounts for years. Then use the money as if I had an additional paycheck that size, with savings accounts and Mututal funds and what not.
It would be a while before I “saved” enough to buy a new Porsche or whatever, and I would want to avoid the scrutiny of loan approval since I have no pay stubs for it, but it would work, I think.
I would make sure I had a good tax attorney and a good CPA. I might want to make sure I had a good criminal attorney (and hopefully a clean background - fortunately, I do). Its the sort of thing that is legal, but since it isn’t common for $100M to drop from the sky, the chances it attracts attention and you spend a lot of your time explaining to police that you don’t import heroin are pretty high.
Also fortunately you can’t involuntarily commit someone for simply being delusional enough to believe the money came from a genie wish.
Unfortunately, you forgot to specify the currency, so you get a single banknote of 100M Zimbabwean dollars. Which, of course, is not worth a lot.
There’s always got to be a comedian…and ours seems to be running late.
You may want to step up your deposits because it would take you over 4000 years to get it all deposited (assuming that that is the ultimate goal).
If you deposited $1000 per day, it would still take you around 270 years to get it all deposited.
Perhaps a better alternative would be for you to open your own community bank.
Better call Saul!
I can come up with some basic money laundering schemes involving my recently deceased grandfather’s attic and “finding” antiques, cash, and art, then using the proceeds to buy a carwash.
But really I’d just declare it. Or keep it in multiple safe places and use it to pay bills, making my legit salary go much further towards fun stuff.