Every other law works this way. And again my disclaimer as I have already upset @DrDeth I get the law, but it is childish and unsuited to a free country.
I get that large cash transactions are suspicious. If I hand over $100k in cash the government suspects, and they are probably right, that I didn’t find it in my Christian mother’s house. Fair enough.
So they set a limit of $10k. Fair enough. What isn’t fair enough is that my full compliance with that law triggers another law. We think you are too sneaky by your full compliance with the first law. Well, they set the limit in the first place! I’m doing just what you told me to!
Limits are part of all laws; they are arbitrary, but people “structure” their lives around them. How many companies have only 49 employees for example so as not to run into the ACA requirement of providing healthcare insurance? It’s turtles all the way down once you say that barely complying with the law is a violation of another law.
Are you unaware that foreign exchange speculation is a huge industry? Just google “FX spread betting” and you’ll get half a dozen ads and pages full of links of companies wanting to enable you to speculate on the future values of "instrument[s] for commerce.
Here’s the one informative summary that pops upon the front page:
Arbitrage is one thing. Buying a currency on the basis that it is going up and up and up and you can’t lose is another. Arbitrage is a necessary part of the financial system. The margins are slim and the risks very carefully balanced. Hence the spread. Bitcoin is a bubble.
It’s forbidden by law to inform a customer that a Suspicious Activity Report has been filed regarding them. It’s a confidential document between the reporting business and the federal agency receiving the report - in the US FinCEN. If anyone in an organisation gives the customer a heads-up, that infraction has to be immediately reported, and the federal agency will advise the organisation on what step’s to take to counteract the heads-up. They’ll also file charges against the person who informed the customer. That person’s prospects of continued employment after the matter is resolved are zero. Basically, the reporting business is going to do everything it can to hang the person who informed the customer about the suspicious activity report out to dry and have them shoulder all the blame. The business in the meantime will be under immense scrutiny over whether they’re involved in a criminal enterprise, as opposed to just providing a service to a customer who happens to be a criminal.
Your full compliance is the question. The structuring law is all about you evading the reporting law. You are not complying with the reporting law by structuring. If you act in any manner that is influenced by the reporting law so as to avoid reporting you are not in full compliance. An argument that the reporting law forces you to do anything other than report is simply admitting that you are not complying, or intend not to comply. The reporting law does not force anyone to do anything other than report. It does not dictate how you should deposit money or in what quantities. Avoiding reporting is not following the rules.
An argument that “I don’t want to report, therefore the reporting law forces me to break another law” is basically an admission that you wish to evade the reporting law because you don’t like it.
I don’t want to be breath tested by the cops, so the presence of a cop waving me over caused me to illegally perform a u-turn at speed and drive recklessly; it was all the fault of the blood alcohol laws. It doesn’t matter if I was totally baked or not, I don’t like the idea of breath testing drivers. It is an invasion of my privacy.
I read your whole response, but this sentence shows how astounding and unusual the structuring law is. I avoid the application of thousands of laws every day. I put my trash in a garbage can instead of on the side of the road. I wait until I get inside my home to pop a beer instead of inside the car on the way home.
Name any law. Compliance is what is desired. But with this law only, compliance is viewed as bad, so we need another law that punishes you for strict compliance with the former law.
You have a very strange way of reading the law. You keep saying you are complying, but you are not.
The law says - report large money transactions.
You are making a large money transaction.
You don’t report the transaction by structuring.
How is this complying with the reporting law?
I’m viewing this as two laws:
- Cash transactions of over $10k is bad.
Okay, so I comply by doing only $9k transactions.
- Yeah, well, fuck you, that’s close enough, new law to catch your sneaky ass.
Really, this is deliberate misreading of the law. No part of the law says transactions over $10k are bad. This is a very weak straw man argument. What you claim the reporting law is isn’t what it actually is. So arguments about the sensibleness of the structuring law are simply invalid.
The reporting law says report $10k and above. There is no “these are bad” anywhere here. There is no admonition to perform lesser transactions.
Reporting law plus a citizen’s desire to not report does not somehow create a new special law that allows specious argument. The law is what it says. If you don’t like it and want to evade it, you have a problem.
Every law is like this. A law that says you have to report something harms someone who would like, or very much not like, to report.
We keep kicking at each other over the semantics of this. I have no problem reporting my cash transactions. I am talking about the guy who wants, or demands, to be in full compliance, but no more, with the reporting law. Do we get each other? (And that sounds snarky, not meant to be).
I don’t want to tell the government a single damned thing. I sit down and read the law. What do I have to do not to make me a federal felon? It seems that if I read the law and hear the opinions of some fine posters in this thread, my initial thought made me a federal felon if I do anything but report.
You need to stop right here.
Nothing else in the arguments matters other than this. You don’t have the right not to tell the government. You can moan and groan and make comparisons with communist dictatorships, but the reality is simple. You live in a modern society with a constitution that provides a mix of responsibilities and protections. Nothing in your opinions about what should be matters. Take it up with your congresscritter. That is how your constitution allows you to affect things. But until the law is changed, and you wish to remain a citizen of your country, and retain the protections that that citizenship provides, you have legal responsibilities. Reporting money transaction is one of them.
Correct. The law says you have to report. Your duty as a law abiding citizen is to report. If for some reason you have an innate distrust of your country’s government, you have a much bigger problem. One that isn’t going to be solved by arguing semantics of the law.
On the contrary, there are numerous laws against structuring to prevent disclosure of activities within financial reporting.
To give you a bit of background, it’s pretty common for a financial institution to have several client accounts for a single customer. The different client accounts may be for different areas of the customers business, for departments within an area, or even for individual employees such as traders. Financial institutions do a lot of regulatory reporting. In the reports that involve customers, they don’t report by client account. They’re legally obligated to report at the customer level. They use a concept termed an ultimate parent account. That account is the top of the pyramid that all of the child accounts fall under through multiple levels. Want a surefire way to have a Suspicious Activity Report filed against your business? Try to mask who is the ultimate parent of a client account you’ve opened.
As an example of the above, brokerages are required to file high volume activity reports with US exchanges. They file these reports based on the activity of the ultimate parent account and all the child accounts underneath them. The exchanges compile these reports, perform some analysis against them and then forward them to the Securities Exchange Commission. It’s a requirement of the exchanges that the customer reporting by ultimate parent is accurate and that a customer is not split into multiple ultimate parents. That requirement is backed by SEC regulations and therefore by US federal law.
Want a different example? Banks are required to report their counterparty exposures to their regulators. Banks can have multiple accounts with each other. JP Morgan and Citibank probably have thousands of accounts with each other. Some banks, especially those with offshore operations, might be tempted to exclude some of their riskier exposures from this reporting. It’s a different type of structuring, but it has the same aim of creating a false disclosure in a financial report to a government agency and it’s quite against the law.
A third example would be margin calls. Trading companies will extend credit to their clients to make trades which the client holds as positions in margin accounts. Positions can go down in value and if a position goes too low, a client will be required to put more funds into the account as collateral. The demand for collateral is a margin call. Trading companies establish procedures and parameters for when they will make margin calls. These procedures and parameters apply to individual trading accounts and cumulatively across the entire customer trading organisation - the ultimate parent concept described above, or subsidiary parent levels underneath the ultimate parent. The procedures and parameters are submitted by trading companies to lenders and insurers as covenants for the loans and policies they undertake. Sometimes trading companies will seek to avoid making margin calls in order to protect an important client. They’ll move collateral between individual accounts or attempt to disguise the customer’s cumulative position by manipulating the parent structure of their client accounts. These are other forms of structuring. They’re also violations of the covenants of the loans and policies. And if the trading company has a requirement to report violations of their covenants, it’s fraud when they don’t do so. (It should also be mentioned that the clients will often be complicit, or even demanding in the attempt to avoid the margin calls. I don’t know how illegal that is. I’m only familiar with the financial reporting side.)
There are plenty of other examples of illegal structuring to avoid financial reporting. However, I think I’ve been verbose enough with the three above. Structuring isn’t only illegal for bank deposits. It has multiple forms and all of them represent illicit activity and should be submitted under a Suspicious Activity Report if they’re discovered.
I think your argument could be the same if you substituted, “with a ten minute search of your house” in certain places. Would you still chastise me in the same way?
I can’t really work out what you mean in terms of the substitution.
Is there a law allowing an arbitrary ten minute search of your property? If there isn’t the argument is useless. Another straw man.
But the law is the law. Sometimes the law seems unreasonable. Sometimes the law is unreasonable. But if you break an unreasonable law, you have still broken a law. Fighting it is another matter, but if you want to act within the law, you do so. You don’t get to modify the law based upon your own idea of what is reasonable. The idea of reasonable within the law might be determined by your peers, if you want a trial by jury.
Two scenarios…neither of which the police have any reason to believe that you have broken the law:
-
What’s going on in that living room? Give us just a peek.
-
What are you buying with that money?
I have no special knowledge, but my understanding is that in neither case is such a demand for search lawful. So what is the problem? The argument makes no sense in context and has no impact on the discussion.
I stated it imprecisely. They are demanding in both circumstances.
And in both cases you can tell them to go away. And they will know they have no right to push the request.
Police are very good at social engineering and getting people to agree to such things, but they have no special legal right to demand. So again, this has no bearing on the discussion.
And if they demand that Bob Smith Ford Dealership gives a report, are they really pretending that they aren’t demanding the purpose of the payment?
I am in the same position as you. We are talking past each other. If I report a transaction, or structure it to hide it, to the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas, how am I not reporting to the government what I am doing with my legal cash? Do they think I bought livestock there?