I am in the process of moving some of my savings to gold but don’t want to trigger the IRS reporting or anything else for that matter. If I withdrawal $3,500 a day or a few times a week, will that cause problems? I have been saving for a while, and so it is definitely out of the ordinary for me to withdraw that kind of money frequently, however, I did tell them what I was doing, and even inquired about safety deposit boxes to store the gold I am buying.

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
    51·
    18 hours ago

    It requires intent to evade reporting requirements. The prosecution needs to prove intent, so if it was completely accidental

    Which this wasn’t.

    If regulators actually pursue an investigation, you’d give an explanation of your actions and the case would likely be. dropped.

    There was a guy who got convicted of structuring because his armored car service or whatever gave him a limit of $10,000, so he would do deposits whenever his amount of cash started to get close to that. Presumably he explained himself in court. Guilty. Nobody decided to drop the case because he had a good explanation. For all I know, he’s now unemployable to this day because of his criminal history.

    You have this sort of boy-scout understanding of how federal charges work that is not at all how they work. A lot of things in life work by just giving the honest explanation and people being reasonable. Being prosecuted is not one of those things.

    If my bank called me asking about suspicious transactions, I’d tell them the truth, which lets them complete their report and the whole thing likely disappears.

    That’s a whole different scenario. For some reason I was thinking you were talking about getting a call from the feds. Your bank calling is a little different.

    If you were talking about getting a call from the bank, I would… well, OP basically is laying out that he’s planning to structure his deposits to evade the IRS reporting requirements, so I wouldn’t really advise telling that even to the bank. Again, being upfront about that kind of thing can be a quick recipe for prison. Just don’t do it. And, since you haven’t done it, if your bank calls and asks what you’re doing, you can be upfront about the not-criminal thing you are doing, if the not-criminal thing you are doing has somehow triggered some red flag. That I can agree with you on.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
        31·
        18 hours ago

        It’s in the John Oliver segment about structuring, which for some reason I can’t find right now. It’s in there though. That’s the only reason I know anything about this stuff.

        • Ajen@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          41·
          17 hours ago

          I’m sorry, but what you’re saying doesn’t sound accurate. It would be a lot easier to believe you of you had evidence. Not that I think you’re lying, but you could be mistaken.

          • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
            4·
            17 hours ago

            I can’t find the specific case (and it looks like it was maybe his insurance policy covering only up to $10,000, as opposed to the armored car service, which makes sense), but I found this:

            https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/us/law-lets-irs-seize-accounts-on-suspicion-no-crime-required.html

            In one Long Island case, the police submitted almost a year’s worth of daily deposits by a business, ranging from $5,550 to $9,910. The officer wrote in his warrant affidavit that based on his training and experience, the pattern “is consistent with structuring.” The government seized $447,000 from the business, a cash-intensive candy and cigarette distributor that has been run by one family for 27 years.

            More than two years ago, the government seized $447,000, and the brothers have been unable to retrieve it. Mr. Salzman, who has taken over legal representation of the brothers, has argued that prosecutors violated a strict timeline laid out in the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act, passed in 2000 to curb abuses. The office of the federal attorney for the Eastern District of New York said the law’s timeline did not apply in this case. Still, prosecutors asked the Hirsches’ first lawyer, Joseph Potashnik, to waive the CARFA timeline. The waiver he signed expired almost two years ago.

            The federal attorney’s office said that parties often voluntarily negotiated to avoid going to court, and that Mr. Potashnik had been engaged in talks until just a few months ago. But Mr. Potashnik said he had spent that time trying, to no avail, to show that the brothers were innocent. They even paid a forensic accounting firm $25,000 to check the books.

            “I don’t think they’re really interested in anything,” Mr. Potashnik said of the prosecutors. “They just want the money.”

            So, you might be partially right: This might be an older pattern back when civil forfeiture was easier, when they could just take all your money because of “structuring,” but in the modern day, they might need to take you to court where you can easily beat the case if there was no intent. I definitely won’t swear that the case I remembered did not involve civil forfeiture.

            Of course, the laws and prosecutions are about to get pretty fucking wild, so who knows what will happen to the civil forfeiture reforms. I definitely wouldn’t start assuming good faith or fair dealing on the part of any federal prosecutors this year going forward. Bottom line try not to commit any crimes.

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      “[Twoflower] also believed that anyone could understand anything he said provided he spoke loudly and slowly, that people were basically trustworthy, and that anything could be sorted out among men of goodwill if they just acted sensibly.” -The Light Fantastic, Terry Prachett

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      21·
      17 hours ago

      Which this wasn’t.

      True. I’m talking about this statement you made:

      You don’t even have to be doing it on purpose to be guilty

      That part is false. If you aren’t doing it on purpose, you’re missing the intent required to be in violation of the law. I’ll quote again:

      No person shall, for the purpose of evading the reporting requirements of…

      And yes, I was talking about getting a call from the bank. That will happen pretty much every time unless it’s very clear that you’re trying to break the law, and getting a call from the bank could tip you off to destroy evidence or something.

      If you know about the reporting requirements and are actively trying to avoid them (like the OP), I would hope you’d know enough to not admit to that over a potentially recorded line. If you’re unaware of the law and were not trying to avoid reporting requirements, there is very little, if any, harm in explaining yourself (they already have the evidence anyway).

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
        2·
        11 hours ago

        That part is false. If you aren’t doing it on purpose, you’re missing the intent required to be in violation of the law.

        Yeah. Like I said, I think you are correct that I was misremembering, and the letter of the law is as you said.

        If you’re unaware of the law and were not trying to avoid reporting requirements, there is very little, if any, harm in explaining yourself (they already have the evidence anyway).

        Maybe. Like I said, if there’s a totally innocent explanation and the bank is who you’re talking to, then probably you’re right that just giving the innocent explanation is fine.

        It still just makes me incredibly queasy as a general rule, because there can be tiny elements (like in this case the issue of intent) where if you don’t know the statute, and you’re just kind of explaining stuff, you can accidentally confirm some minor element of the statute that they otherwise would have had some incredibly difficult time proving and give your lawyer fits and maybe do some time. It’s just a really bad habit to get into. They might have the material evidence of what transactions happened, but not the why, and your explanation of why it was innocent might accidentally confirm something in the statute. Whether or not you “meant any harm” or anything, and certainly whether you were aboveboard in your first interview before you talked with a lawyer just to be safe, is often totally irrelevant in court.

        If the bank calls you, just explain. Assuming you’ve been following the law, which you really should have been. If it’s anything else, it should be Shut the Fuck up Friday.