Posted on 05/27/2016 7:27:36 AM PDT by milton23
For nearly 100 years, Vocatura’s Bakery has been a New England staple.
The family business was started in Westerly, Rhode Island, in 1919 and moved to its current home in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1956.
There, the family bakes bread using its six-decade-old industrial oven and serves up pizza—square, but not sicilian—and sandwiches—including one “as long as your forearm”—to members of the community.
The bakery has been family-owned and operated since its opening in 1919, and today, it’s run by David Vocatura, Larry Vocatura, Frankie Vocatura, and Richard Vocatura. The foursome still remembers being pushed around the bakery in a hand truck and crawling into the turned-off oven to ride the baking trays around and around.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailysign.al ...
I know the Bank Secrecy Act has been around for decades, but I was under the impression that they changed it under the Patriot Act to catch "structuring" as a means of concealing transactions over $10,000.
They should anyway. Interest rates are too low for a savings account.
I’m sure neither you nor I approve of the innocent until proven guilty attitude of the IRS, or of the agencies that practice civil forfeiture.
Call me a paranoid if you will, but I keep a substantial amount of cash in my gunsafe, leaving enough in a couple of bank accounts to cover my bills....just in case.
Specifically, the act requires financial institutions to keep records of cash purchases of negotiable instruments, and file reports of cash purchases of these negotiable instruments of more than $10,000 (daily aggregate amount), and to report suspicious activity that might signify money laundering, tax evasion, or other criminal activities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act
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PS=> FURMN
According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act it is called The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (or BSA, or otherwise known as the Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act) so yes; it’s been around since 1970. I think some additional provisions, reporting requirements, mostly what additional reporting was required by the banks were added under the Patriot Act, but that did not involve the cash transactions of $10,000 or more reporting requirement, as that is original to the 1970 law and thanks to Richard Nixon’s “War On Drugs”.
“Businesses that deal primarily in cash, such as bars and restaurants, can be exempted from having their deposits and withdrawals reported on CTRs, although this exemption is rarely granted. Instead, most banks have computer systems which retain information on CTRs and allow duplicate CTRs to be created seamlessly.”
I imagine the exemptions are granted mostly for large retail operations (like a Wal-Mart for example) and not small mom and pop shops.
But it seems to me that either their bank didn’t do a very good job in explaining the requirement and or retaining their CTR information on file so a new form would not have to be created with each cash deposit of $10k or more or the owners didn’t bother to find out what the requirements are.
“David Vocatura had made cash deposits of under $10,000 into the bakery’s account, but only after a bank employee called the bakery in 2007 to tell them that deposits of more than that amount required them to submit additional paperwork.”
“The terminology that they used was never really explained to us in detail,” David Vocatura told The Daily Signal. “We just thought it was an inconvenience or a nuisance for [the bank].”
And that was IMO perhaps Vocatura’s real mistake. If someone, like a bank teller tells you something is required but isn’t able to adequately explain why or how, you need keep asking questions and to talk to someone who can. That can be the bank manager, a lawyer or their accountant or, if they belonged to a local Chamber of Commerce or a business association, other restaurant owners.
I’m also curious as to why the bank didn’t bother to tell Vocatura about the reporting requirement until 2007 when this requirement has been around since 1970? Perhaps their business had grown around that time and they hadn’t needed to deposit amounts over the limit before then or…. they had been doing so previously, i.e. reporting and then decided to keep the amounts under $10k as to avoid having to report it. That would of course raise a red flag with bank regulators and the IRS if all of a sudden their bank deposits dropped to just under the $10k requirement and didn’t, how shall I say - “match up” to their business tax returns. But that would IMO have to be proved by the IRS before a civil forfeiture of assets.
I am not at all or in any way defending the seizure of their bank account assets by the IRS absent criminal charges and a guilty verdict after a trial and I believe that these types of civil forfeitures are un-Constitutional however, and I hate to say this, but the restaurant business is rather notorious for “skimming”, i.e. not reporting all of their cash receipts. I know this as I once worked for a very small accounting firm that also installed bookkeeping and POS systems and we had several small restaurants and bars as clients. We had at least two of these business owners ask us how they could circumvent the POS system as to not report some of the payments customers made in cash. They also played rather fast and loose with the tip reporting and not always to the server’s benefit. Just saying.
However, that’s not to say that this business is guilty of doing anything wrong and whether they are or aren’t, they are still entitled to due process.
FWIW:
ATR Endorses the DUE PROCESS Act to Reform Legalized Property Theft
Support the Due Process Act, H.R. 5283
The bill also codifies the Department of Justice’s March 2015 administrative changes related to the Internal Revenue Service’s egregious abuse of federal forfeiture and structuring laws. This provision ensures that no future administration will be able to reverse the policy and that innocent business owners will not see their bank accounts seized and subjected to forfeiture.
Contact your local Congresscritter and tell him or her you support H.R. 5283.
My impression was that the reporting requirement for cash transactions over $10k was created in 1970, but the rules on “structuring” (covering multiple transactions even when each one separately was under the $10k limit) were not added until the Patriot Act was passed.
Since 1937.
Donald Trump should say he will have these IRS thugs fired on his first day in office.
I urge straight people everywhere to locate gay bakeries and walk in with
“I Stump for Trump” buttons and make them bake cakes for straight Christian weddings.
Fair’s fair.
They certainly are better than the Mafia at extorting money from people. I imagine the mob is pretty jealous of all the money they missed out on.
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