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Comment by emotionalcode | Hacker News Reader

> He added that making deposits under $10,000 to evade reporting requirements, called structuring, is still a crime whether the money is from legal or illegal sources.

I don't understand this. How can anyone know whether what they are doing is wrong unless those rules are built into the structure of the law and the infrastructure of banks?

From how I read this, one government 'report' gets triggered if deposits are over 10,000$. Another government 'report' gets triggered if deposits are made for an indeterminate period of time under 10,000$.

> Instead, the money was seized solely because she had deposited less than $10,000 at a time, which they viewed as an attempt to avoid triggering a required government report.

How can they assume this?

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> I don't understand this. How can anyone know whether what they are doing is wrong unless those rules are built into the structure of the law and the infrastructure of banks?

Criminalizing secondary and tertiary acts related to a crime is a disturbing trend. There's an act that is broadly regarded as a crime -- in this case, tax evasion or money laundering. Well those crimes are hard to detect. So we create a new reporting requirements law. Well, that's easy to circumvent by moving money in smaller amounts. So we create a new law that makes it a crime to move money in smaller chunks if it is related to avoiding reporting requirements.

This is problematic. It makes acts illegal that viewed in isolation are widely regarded as perfectly legal. Even worse, these secondary acts are commonly done legally by many citizens. What citizen doesn't move money around in small chunks? This gives a lot of discretion to the government to charge you with a crime. Afterall, your actions on their face are very similar to that of tax evaders. In fact, even my earlier example of money laundering is one of these secondary crimes because it is used to clean the money obtained through illegal activity.

It isn't just the act of making deposits less than $10,000 that is structuring, as you quote, it's making deposits under $10,000 to evade reporting requirements.

If you run a small business and make deposits of $5,000 because that's all you build up in a week, you have a pretty good chance of making the case that you are just doing your business. If you need $35,000 for some purpose and make 4 or 5 trips to the bank to get it, your explanation of why you needed to make 4 or 5 trips is sure to amuse the investigators.

It is none of their business why I needed my money or how many trips it took.

I understand what you are saying, but the law says different. My main aim with the comment was to point out the (apparent) subtlety, not to declare my views on the situation.

> If you need $35,000 for some purpose and make 4 or 5 trips to the bank to get it, your explanation of why you needed to make 4 or 5 trips is sure to amuse the investigators.

Because walking with $35K in your pocket is simply stupid?

Taking multiple trips would make the risk of being robbed at all go up but the amount taken could never be more than whatever fraction of $35K you decided to walk around with.

Anything over $5000 is madness. once in my life I walked around with in excess of $10K on my person and I felt decidedly funny even though nobody could have seen the difference between the skinny kid in jeans with and without that kind of money on him. Never been more nervous in my life on the street, it was as if there was a huge red light on my forehead spelling out 'target'. I could totally understand why someone would not withdraw $35K all at once but rather make multiple trips with much smaller amounts.

My bank seems to agree with this principle because it is impossible to transfer more then 20K in one go even from my own account to one of their internal accounts.

I wonder if the 20k is due to a similar reporting requirement?

Is that for all types of transactions, like if you had a business account and wanted to wire money to the U.S.?

I don't know, I've not yet had the need to wire such large amounts outbound. It might be a limit tied to my checking account or a more general limit. (I was paying off a mortgage so I ended up doing a whole pile of 20K transactions just to get around the block.)

Yes. Banks are required to file CTRs (currency transaction reports) for transactions over $10k. They also have an obligation to file SARs (suspicious activity reports) for suspicious transactions as low as $5k or less in some cases.

The former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer attempted to obfuscate a $5,000 wire to an escort agency, his bank's compliance department filed a SAR, bringing his activities to the attention of Federal prosecutors, and led him to resign to avoid a worse fate.

This is a huge problem for operators of cash businesses... It's easy to screw up when they try to avoid paying taxes and get too greedy.

There are also Monetary Instrument Logs (MILs) for purchases of cashier's checks and similar items for amounts between $3,000 and $10,000

Maybe I'm just dense, but who are you and all these people who have large sums of cash stolen by law enforcement dealing with that has to have it in cash? When I had to get $7500 to the dealership where I bought my car, I just got a cashier's check. The $10 they charged me was more than worth the peace of mind I got from knowing it was safe against thieves both with the force of law behind them and without.

I don't think I'd do business with anyone that wouldn't take a cashier's check.

I've moved more than 10k in cash around just to avoid paying that 10 bucks. $10 is still $10.

The phrase for this is "Penny wise and pound foolish."

So when you get your change from the local shops, do they give you a cashier's check? One of the things I did at my mother's bookshop was take the weekly cash takings to the bank, and bring back some change for the next week. Those trips were usually in the low- to mid- four figures.

I'm interested in how you propose to have a retail worker somehow convert the cash on their premises into a cashier's check, so they can walk to the bank and deposit it.

Sure, for that use case, you do actually need to haul around cash. Assuming it's not economical to use an armored car service. Also the stakes in this case are much lower. Losing a week's worth of revenue isn't quite the same as losing the down payment of your mortgage. But that wasn't what the grandparent was referring to.

Cash deposit for a store I worked for.

It's totally subjective.

I have never had 20K in my pocket, just 5K. But when I plan to withdraw money, I dress less than nice, I don't shave myself, I may use my uglier shoes, etc.

And they I forget the money. So I don't look funny, because I'm not thinking about the money. I'm probably eating something bought in the street, so I'm focused on the food.

But of course I do agree with everything you say.

Easy explanation:

To avoid getting stopped by cops who'd "confiscate" it just because carrying so much money is suspicious and drug-dealer-like.* Or, what amounts to the same thing: To avoid losing such an amount of money in a mugging.

* http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/st...

>You have a pretty good chance of making the case that you are just doing your business

Did you read the article? Specifically the story of the business that made <10k deposits because they had theft protection of max 10,000 ?

By the time you "make a case" you're already out lawyer fees and risk your business being closed. Please read the article (again). IRS does not need to show that you were trying to evade reporting requirements to seize the money. They don't even need to file a case!

There's millions of small businesses, there must be hundreds of thousands making frequent medium sized cash transactions and they made 600 seizures.

A statistic like that doesn't make things any more just for the 600, but it serves as some sort of guide for how much a cash business should worry about it.

My problem isn't with the statistics. My problem is that the law depends on fuzzy bits of information that are easy to rhetorically manipulate in order to direct a case towards (complete and total financial asset seizure, immediately) or (not). It's not logical. The seizure is not reliant on facts. It is not reliant on evidence.

This demonstrates an imbalance between ability to determine truth, and ability for the powers that be to act. It is dependent purely on abstract pattern. Other commenters have pointed out that that model can be used to accurately represent the behavior of innocents.

I'd much rather see data on the effectiveness of this law. Does it actually track suspicious activity? Does it work, and is the value of that work enough to justify the grief it creates to the few you refer to that the law affects?

I think I'm just separating concerns more than most here. I guess because I'm not that outraged by society doing something unjust (because look around).

Does it sound like the law is being used unfairly? Yeah.

Does it sound like the law as written is easy to use unfairly? Maybe, probably yes.

Would I oppose changes to the law intended to make it harder to abuse? No.

Do I think it is a major practical concern for a typical small business or individual? No.

I don't think it is inconsistent or difficult to hold all those ideas at once.

This is the problem. The law requires intentionality. The enforcement of the law "divines" intentionality. Seems a clear problem because the executive branch (enforcement) is essentially playing judge, jury, and executioner. And by doing so is essentially dis-regarding the intentions of the law as it was written. (cue: irony).

They have more guns than we do. They can do pretty much whatever.

Bank employees are instructed to file reports on people who deposit funds in ways that appear to be avoiding reporting requirements. Even inquiring about limits can trigger one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report

Also you've triggered a MIL report if you've ever used a money order or cashier's check for more than 3k. A lot of this stuff is old and they haven't adjusted the amounts.

There's really no hard rule. It's based on the feeling of whoever is reviewing your account transactions. Even if you deposit $2-3k every month, your account could still be under suspicion.

> How can they assume this?

Because they don't have to prove anything to seize the money. You are assuming that you are dealing with a system based on rule of law when this is clearly not the case.

The law is a tool used against the population. Your right to make cash deposits counts for nothing in light of the State's right to fuck anyone they think might be criminal. False positives don't matter. They just create more work, and grow the department. You'd think they'd have more reliable tools but this is their bread and butter.

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