Yes. One, it isn’t the police demanding. Two, it is all about the money, not the cars. Sure the government can then infer that cars have been bought, and that may help them further track down the manner in which money flows. They have not demanded a search, so the question has not changed.
Eventually you have to trust someone. If you don’t trust your government you have bigger problems. Again, all the complaining about the specific laws and their application comes down to this.
If the government sees Joe Citizen blow a bunch of cash at the casino, they probably don’t care. Not unless you imagine that the government has some nefarious division whose entire job is making life bad for Joe Citizen. That is generally called paranoia. If however Joe Citizen blows large amounts of cash at the casino regularly, the government is probably going to take a legitimate interest in him.
If you believe that the reporting is a violation of your search rights, you can take it to the SCOTUS.
I said, and I must repeat again that this is just general whining and bitching. To get in my living room, the government needs a warrant backed up with probable cause. I don’t have to say a single word. In fact, I can affirmatively tell them to fuck off.
But to emerge from my house, which everyone has to do, and transact business, which everyone has to do, then they can put restrictions on that transaction under the general heading of “crime fighting.” Well, that’s not a freedom guarantee at all. Especially when they pass a law and then pass another law that says by complying with the first law, you are breaking the law.
This is an eternal tension. I don’t think anyone has any clue how you resolve it.
As explained above, whatever law you think you are complying with isn’t the law you think it is. You are inventing a law that doesn’t exist for the sake of the argument.
Oh come on. You know what I am saying. It’s “bad” enough that free people need to disclose to them why they are doing it. And then $9k and so forth down the line are bad if you don’t want your government overlords to inspect your cash transactions.
Interesting. I’m not sure. Could you send me $10k instead?
That’s the problem in your logic. The law says you must ahve a driver’s license to use the public road (or else ride a horse or a bike). The law says you must report your income, even gifts over $X. The law says you must register if you want to vote. The law says you must show ID and subject to a search to board an airline. The law requires you get get a license to marry, to register a birth or death if you want it to be legally known for assorted purposes.
We live in a society where a lot of things are noted by the authorities for assorted reasons.
Simple - to not be a felon -
If you have a cash transaction over $10,000 - make it. A CTR will be filed. The feds might(!) show up to ask you how you came by that much cash. Answer honestly. (Lying to the FBI is itself a crime). If you answer honestly, the explanation makes sense, and especially if there are substantiating circumstances, you are fine.
If you have a cash transaction under $10,000 - make it. The bank will maybe file and SAR depending on what they know about you and your finances. It’s their job. Then, see note above about the feds.
If you have multiple cash transactions under $10,000 - make them. This assumes a valid reason why you cannot make one large cash transaction, such as daily receipts from your business. Depending on why, the bank may or may not file a SAR. (Maybe they will to be safe) Be sure it’s valid. Then see note above about feds.
Your protection from inordinate authoritarianism is that there are probably so many reports (CTR and SAR) that are filed that only the more unusual are investigated.
Free people need to disclose, because money laundering - legitimizing large amounts of cash - is a major criminal activity. Same reason you can’t carry firearms on an airplane. Same reason there are rules of the road about traffic lights, speeding and insurance. (You may be able to drive safely at 100mph but evidence indicates a lot of people have problems with 70mph.)
So the rules are structured so that it is very difficult for criminals, but a minor inconvenience for most legitimate people.
Perhaps a better analogy would be - you are driving down the road, pulled over for speeding. While writing you a ticket, the officer sees a baggie of white powder in your car. He will ask what’s in the bag, may ask to see it, may then use it as a reason to search the car. it may be your favourite coffee creamer or sugar. It may be laundry detergent - if it’s sitting on top of a basket of laundry, there’s a good chance he won’t even ask about it. If it’s poking out from under the passenger seat like it was trying to be hidden, it’s more suspicious. (When I’ve gone on vacation, sometimes I’ve taken a tupperware container of detergent since those tiny laundromat boxes can be hard to find.)
The point is - the baggie is unusual enough to raise questions. Once those questions are answered, that may be the end of it. Or the beginning of a 10-year sentence.
An analogy to structuring might be - let’s say you are in a state where personal amounts of marijuana are not prosecuted. So one little baggie - no problem. If you are carrying a dozen little baggies, you can’t get away with “but each is a personal use amount.”
A better analogy. You’re on a highway with no speed limit - only safe driving is required. However, since driving above 70 mph is often unsafe, the highway patrol automatically records the license plate of every car that exceeds that speed. If you drive at 60 miles per hour, you’ll not be recorded - but if you repeatedly accelerate from 60 to 70, then slam on the brakes to avoid being recorded, you’ll get some attention from the police.
Another one- You are in a neighborhood with a lot of stolen car activity. The Police drive down the street, and camera automatically records and checks license plate numbers.
Your car is not stolen, and you are parked legally. But you remove your license plates at night as you do not want to get recorded. You get a ticket!
I wondered: given the significance of the 50 employee threshold, surely there must be companies out there that split into multiple 49-employee subcompanies, ostensibly different but all working together under the same owner, solely to work around the threshold.
Employer Aggregation Rules
Companies with a common owner or that are otherwise related under certain rules of section 414 of the Internal Revenue Code are generally combined and treated as a single employer for determining ALE status. If the combined number of full-time employees and full-time equivalent employees for the group is large enough to meet the definition of an ALE, then each employer in the group (called an ALE member) is part of an ALE and is subject to the employer shared responsibility provisions, even if separately the employer would not be an ALE.
Of course, the IRS has an easier time in this case, since companies are persistent entities and so the IRS can set up rules for how they get aggregated. But it’s essentially the same concept; employers would be highly motivated to “structure” their employee counts via tricks with holding companies if there weren’t aggregation rules in place.
Turns out the Feds aren’t as dumb as they look, and there’s more than one instance where the “ha, I’ll work around arbitrary threshold X by splitting Y into multiple parts” strategy has already been foreseen and nipped in the bud.
Feels a bit like flogging a dead horse, but another similar set of reporting laws comes to mind.
Governments everywhere require both citizens and non-citizens to register their movements when leaving or entering the country. There are lots of reasons, but most of them have a desire to reduce or detect various crimes, from illegal immigration to trafficking. As a non-US citizen I see this clearly on entering the USA, I get to fill in various forms, and on exit I am required to be reported as leaving (otherwise it may be a bit difficult entering next time.)
There are other laws and penalties for not reporting. I don’t get to swim the Rio-Grande, I don’t get to fly in in a private plane or sail into a port in the dead of night. Airlines are governed by a set of regulations about reporting passengers, and see significant penalties for breaches. (International carriers are required to register their passenger’s details before arrival.) Even if I am a US citizen I get reported.
Nobody says that international travel is a bad thing. The laws on reporting travel, passing through custom and immigration controls etc are not defining such travel as a bad thing. They are there because international travel aids some criminal activities, and reporting on travel aids the government in tracking or preventing such activity. International tourism is a huge money earner, and people are encouraged to visit the US. But the government requires that international tourists register their travel in and out of the country, and provide penalties for not doing so, both to the traveller and the carrier. Travelling under a false passport is itself against the law. Similarly they require that their own citizens register their movements in and out of the country.
There is nothing bad about it at all. I’ve been subject to CTR’s several times.
When I bought my house, I sold off some stock that I had for the down payment, and they had to ask where I got the money, even though the check that I deposited clearly came from my brokerage.
When I consolidated some debts, I had one filled out, even though it was the bank literally giving itself the money. That’s actually happened a few times now with my business.
So no, nothing bad at all about such a transaction. I think that’s where you keep getting hung up, in insisting that there is something bad about such a transaction.
I don’t know what they did on their end, but in all those transactions, questions were asked as to where I got the money from, even though it was pretty obvious, IMO, where the money had come from.
I was assuming it was for a CTR, but maybe it was for some other purpose.
Aha - further google shows - CTR is Currency Transaction Report - so large sums of cash. A SAR is any transaction or pattern that is sufficiently unusual (or unusual for that bank client). So likely they were asking questions to see whether the transactions rose to the level of “suspicious”.
Since you mentioned it was in the context of buying a house, the mortgage company usually wants to know where you got the down-payment money because they have an interest in knowing if you have any other loans tied to the house. This is unrelated to the CTR/SAR process, though someone more knowledgeable than me would have to opine on whether or not they’d also ask questions in this scenario to determine whether or not to file a SAR.
