Posted on 04/27/2005 7:59:32 AM PDT by PreciousLiberty
In 2006, it'll be a whole lot harder to cheat on your taxes, even accidentally. In fact, you'll also have to field calls from the government over odd deposits that you make, e.g. a deposit at an odd time of the month, or a cash deposit, or a deposit made from a foreign bank, etc. That's because, thanks to the PATRIOT act, banks are spending billions on highly sophisticated, government-mandated anti-money laundering (AML) software that will track every last transaction of every last customer in order to build up individual customer profiles and look for "suspicious" activity. And when they find some suspicious activity, they're going to want an explanation out of you, regardless of whether or not you fit any sort of terrorist profile.
(Excerpt) Read more at arstechnica.com ...
We lost privacy, that's what we lost. That's why I think a transactional account which sidesteps normal banking laws will be developed as the people demand some of their privacy back.
A little ethnic/age/sex profiling would go a LONG way. Having a close look at the young males with Saudi, Jordanian and Egyptian passports would fix 95% of the problem.
Much better than giving up the freedoms.
Insert sexist joke here.
Quote: We lost privacy, that's what we lost.
You mean the 85 year old grandmother who is searched at the airport did not lose freedoms??
If you win a Super Bowl bet or sell something for cash, don't put it in the bank. Spend it on groceries, gas & oil, guitar strings, etc., but use your bank account to buy things that have an audit trail, such as serialized hardware/software, prescriptions, utility and credit card payments, etc.
What also goes along with this is don't give your name, address, and phone # to the store clerk when you purchase anything at a store like Radio Shack, where they want marketing data, but that could easily be tapped for other purposes.
What I think the fed ought to do instead of picking on legit citizens is monitor the enormous outflow of cash sent to Mexico by the hordes of illegal aliens. What are the odds that the taxes on all of that have been paid?
"That's a good story."
Thanks. I find that keeping simple records of my simple business, then paying whatever taxes I actually owe, keeps me sleeping well at night and not worrying about the government.
I don't cheat on my taxes...not even a little bit. If they want to come and have a look at my poor records, they're welcome to. I'm a little lazy with bookkeeping, so a real audit would end up with me getting a refund, since I forget deductions and expenses sometimes.
The heck with them. I keep my life simple and my business small.
To follow your logic, city and state services should be completely gone by now because the yard sale folks aren't paying their local/state sales tax. In fact, the federal government should be gone because the yard sale people, for the most part, aren't reporting the yard sale take on their income tax (most of them forget about it by the time April rolls around).
That's the problem. Drug dealers are 'self employed.' Therefore, if you are making large, irregualrly timed depostis, Uncle Sam wants to make sure you are paying your taxes, whether you are a criminal or not.
"Doesn't alarm me.....if you are concerned, go to cash, go underground....If the gubmint wants to call me about my 50 deposit...fine with me."
I'm with you, Pondman88. But the government guys will have darn few $50 deposits to call me about.
(Could you guys loan me some money so I can make a deposit so they call me?)
Transparent or not, wire transfers are a perfect example of why this money laundering software is no big deal, and this article is hysteria. Terrorists and other criminals are wiring money around all the time, and when a suspicious pattern shows up, they often get busted. That doesn't mean Joe blough gets a call from the IRS when he wires Mom $50. The feds watch the wires, and they aren't interested in doing a fiscal colonoscopy on the average American.
They've been doing this for YEARS guys.. every deposit of 10k or more has had to be reported to Uncle Sam for well over a decade....
Don't use banks if you are worried about it.
I am sure you reported the yard sale of your used hair dryer and old dot matrix printer. (Filing the special tax schedule of course)
Evidently this is how SOME people want our Nation to be.
I'm going to find some 3rd world hell hole to go live in. At least there the Government is too busy being corrupt and fighting insurgents to worry about whether or not I deposited 50.00 at an odd time of the month.
Yeah, ME TOO!
Just do not try to be sneaky - do not deposit $49. This would raise serious suspicions!
I dropped about $58,000 in (after a refi.), no issues. Then again, we know w/refis there is a paper trail a million miles long, redundant title searches, etc
We need to simplify the refi. process! What gets me is the redundancy every time you refinance: repeat title searches, fees etc. What a waste.
There is possibility for abuse here, however it would seem AML techniques/procedures have been in place for quite some time. I don't see this latest software being any more intrusive, as it appears that this merely represents a refinement of AML software already in place.
IOW, it's just as likely that eliminating some bugs in the software/making it "smarter" will make it less intrusive rather than more, as it won't give as many "false positives".
It's long past time to tell Big Stupid Government to just go to hell. See my tagline.
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