Quote:
Originally Posted by GrumpyOldMan
Thank you for posting this, I won't have to.
The main points are - there is NO bill, it is a suggestion. Not reporting income is a federal offense. The proposal is NOT to monitor individual transactions, but aggregate over the year. So, any bank account would report the total amount deposited and withdrawn from the account in the course of a year. NOT when, why, or any other information. So, the IRS can cut down on the Billions that tax cheats are not paying.
If you are not a tax cheat it doesn't impact you at all.
|
I never have liked that argument. If you are not a tax cheat then reporting more information to the IRS doesn't impact you at all sounds a lot like saying if you are not hiding something then letting the police search your body/car/house will not impact you at all.
Lowering the threshold to $600 means nearly everyone with a bank account will be swept up in the data collection. My fear is that whether or not you are a tax cheat will be determined only AFTER the investigation. I worry the burden of proof will be shifted from the Govt to the citizens. Rather than requiring the Govt to show evidence of a crime in order to acquire the banking documents to prove it, now the Govt will have the documents and could easily require honest individuals to show proof that their transactions are not evidence of a crime.
The Govt is trying to find needles in haystacks. Maybe they're right, maybe there are a lot of needles to be found, but anyone who has worked with dried hay will know that the hay itself is pointed and sharp and can be mistaken for a needle. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to imagine an overzealous investigator discovering a large number of needles that eventually turn out to be hay but only after seriously disrupting the lives of people who are not tax cheats at all.
(and that's without getting into the idea that the tax code has been made so complicated that it is already nearly impossible to not make an honest mistake that could be used to launch an investigation)