3 ms·

I strongly disagree that it's authoritarian to audit lots of transactions - 10k is high enough that most people will only hit it when 1) buying a car (or other

by munk-a 5y ago

I strongly disagree that it's authoritarian to audit lots of transactions - 10k is high enough that most people will only hit it when 1) buying a car (or other vehicle - i.e. boat) 2) purchasing a house 3) doing a renovation. Otherwise most normal transactions will be well below this level. I do think that eventually it'd be good to revisit the specific threshold for reporting but 10k still feels incredibly reasonable to me and calling it borderline authoritarian seems quite hyperbolic. Bear in mind that money laundering is extremely effective and difficult to combat without really strong reporting laws and that the detection of money laundering is what leads to take downs of most large criminal organizations since, once you take away their wallet, most of them wither in efficacy.

ghaff 5y ago
A $10k credit card bill isn't rare for people who do a lot of business travel. I'm not sure what "auditing" means in this context. As long as I'm not aware of it, I don't really care. It would rapidly get annoying to fill out some form whenever I had a $10K credit card payment. (Not that it's especially frequent.)
- munk-a 5y ago
  That's alright since the credit card company is the one who'd be filling out the form - you'd only need to fill it out if it was a private transaction between two natural persons - and even then only one form needs to be submitted so if it's someone who regularly engages in such transactions (like some kind of service worker) then they'll probably submit the record of it assuming you insist on paying with cash. Nearly all of this sort of reporting is generally carried out by banks and credit card companies that are being used to execute the transaction - but the US really does want to know if you purchased a used car from someone for 13,000 dollars in cash since, you're probably laundering money at that point.
tehwebguy 5y ago
> 10k is high enough that most people will only hit it when 1) buying a car (or other vehicle - i.e. boat) 2) purchasing a house 3) doing a renovation Okay but in 1970 it was 7 years of median rent, 58% of the median home value and 13 months of median salary according to the census bureau.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Money has definitely become inflated since that 10k figure was originally established - but I don't think it passed a significant threshold societally like, say, five dollars passed. Five dollars was enough to get a modest lunch pretty much anywhere in the 70s and is now, in the affluent parts of the country, around the expected cost for a coffee. 10k, in my mind and opinion of course, went from being "Hey, that's a lot of cash" to "Hey, that's a lot of cash". It remains an amount we (most people at least) don't trivially deal in on a day to day basis and that's where I think the cutoff for this reporting law should be. If most people are going to trigger a mandatory report then LEOs have a lot more data about transactions that are common in society which may be a privacy concern but certainly lowers the usefulness of that ledger - if these transactions are still "rare" then there is a volume of data that can be hand-sifted through to produce interesting insights. With computers and everything in theory we could probably now handle the volume of tracking the full list of every person's transactions but that would lead to normalizing refusing to report large transactions and we'd only end up seeing the transactions that are made by completely innocent people.
dumbfoundded 5y ago
$10K is not a lot of money, especially when compared what $10K was worth when the law was created. $10K won't cover a major health expense, tuition at a nice preschool, a wedding, a nice vacation, any number of hobbies, or many many other things. It's not just a vehicle, house, or renovation.
- munk-a 5y ago
  I think this might be a question of scale since, for me at least, 10k would be an excessively fancy vacation - about three times as costly as a wedding - and when did preschool get so expensive! I suspect that for the average person it's probably reasonable to include a wedding and tuition in the 10k list - maybe a hobby, though you'd only hit 10k for a transaction if you're buying serious power tools or working on a car/reno on your own. From Canada at least an all-inclusive nine day stay in Cancun will currently run you under 3k CAD - I know there are resorts that can break the 1k/day threshold but that's a lot of money to put out for a vacation. And, honestly, if you're spending that much you're likely not going to make the purchase in a single transaction or else you're very much not what I'd consider an average person.
  - dumbfoundded 5y ago
    Preschool in the San Francisco Bay Area is between $1,200 and $2,000 a month (1). The median house price in the Bay Area is over $1M so just the good faith deposit on a house is >$30K let alone the downpayment and closing costs so you're going to have like at least three >$10K transactions. A four-star hotel in Hawaii is >$500/night, a five-star is >$1,000/night. So a nice two week vacation in Hawaii is >$8K just for flights and hotel for 2 people. The average household income in the Bay Area is >$150K/year (2). $10K isn't a lot of money in California and $70K seems much more reasonable for reporting purposes. (1) https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/25/to-stay-or-not-to-stay-home-thats-the-question-more-parents-of-preschoolers-are-asking-themselves/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/25/to-stay-or-not-to-sta... (2) https://dqydj.com/income-by-city/ https://dqydj.com/income-by-city/
  - djrogers 5y ago
    > I suspect that for the average person it's probably reasonable to include a wedding and tuition in the 10k list You're off by a factor of 2-3 here (a little skewed due to COVID), as the average wedding runs 20-30k... [1] https://www.theknot.com/content/average-wedding-cost https://www.theknot.com/content/average-wedding-cost

by munk-a 5y ago

ghaff 5y ago

A $10k credit card bill isn't rare for people who do a lot of business travel. I'm not sure what "auditing" means in this context. As long as I'm not aware of it, I don't really care. It would rapidly get annoying to fill out some form whenever I had a $10K credit card payment. (Not that it's especially frequent.)

munk-a 5y ago
That's alright since the credit card company is the one who'd be filling out the form - you'd only need to fill it out if it was a private transaction between two natural persons - and even then only one form needs to be submitted so if it's someone who regularly engages in such transactions (like some kind of service worker) then they'll probably submit the record of it assuming you insist on paying with cash. Nearly all of this sort of reporting is generally carried out by banks and credit card companies that are being used to execute the transaction - but the US really does want to know if you purchased a used car from someone for 13,000 dollars in cash since, you're probably laundering money at that point.

tehwebguy 5y ago

> 10k is high enough that most people will only hit it when 1) buying a car (or other vehicle - i.e. boat) 2) purchasing a house 3) doing a renovation Okay but in 1970 it was 7 years of median rent, 58% of the median home value and 13 months of median salary according to the census bureau.

munk-a 5y ago
Money has definitely become inflated since that 10k figure was originally established - but I don't think it passed a significant threshold societally like, say, five dollars passed. Five dollars was enough to get a modest lunch pretty much anywhere in the 70s and is now, in the affluent parts of the country, around the expected cost for a coffee. 10k, in my mind and opinion of course, went from being "Hey, that's a lot of cash" to "Hey, that's a lot of cash". It remains an amount we (most people at least) don't trivially deal in on a day to day basis and that's where I think the cutoff for this reporting law should be. If most people are going to trigger a mandatory report then LEOs have a lot more data about transactions that are common in society which may be a privacy concern but certainly lowers the usefulness of that ledger - if these transactions are still "rare" then there is a volume of data that can be hand-sifted through to produce interesting insights. With computers and everything in theory we could probably now handle the volume of tracking the full list of every person's transactions but that would lead to normalizing refusing to report large transactions and we'd only end up seeing the transactions that are made by completely innocent people.

dumbfoundded 5y ago

$10K is not a lot of money, especially when compared what $10K was worth when the law was created. $10K won't cover a major health expense, tuition at a nice preschool, a wedding, a nice vacation, any number of hobbies, or many many other things. It's not just a vehicle, house, or renovation.

munk-a 5y ago
I think this might be a question of scale since, for me at least, 10k would be an excessively fancy vacation - about three times as costly as a wedding - and when did preschool get so expensive! I suspect that for the average person it's probably reasonable to include a wedding and tuition in the 10k list - maybe a hobby, though you'd only hit 10k for a transaction if you're buying serious power tools or working on a car/reno on your own. From Canada at least an all-inclusive nine day stay in Cancun will currently run you under 3k CAD - I know there are resorts that can break the 1k/day threshold but that's a lot of money to put out for a vacation. And, honestly, if you're spending that much you're likely not going to make the purchase in a single transaction or else you're very much not what I'd consider an average person.
- dumbfoundded 5y ago
  Preschool in the San Francisco Bay Area is between $1,200 and $2,000 a month (1). The median house price in the Bay Area is over $1M so just the good faith deposit on a house is >$30K let alone the downpayment and closing costs so you're going to have like at least three >$10K transactions. A four-star hotel in Hawaii is >$500/night, a five-star is >$1,000/night. So a nice two week vacation in Hawaii is >$8K just for flights and hotel for 2 people. The average household income in the Bay Area is >$150K/year (2). $10K isn't a lot of money in California and $70K seems much more reasonable for reporting purposes. (1) https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/25/to-stay-or-not-to-stay-home-thats-the-question-more-parents-of-preschoolers-are-asking-themselves/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/25/to-stay-or-not-to-sta... (2) https://dqydj.com/income-by-city/ https://dqydj.com/income-by-city/
- djrogers 5y ago
  > I suspect that for the average person it's probably reasonable to include a wedding and tuition in the 10k list You're off by a factor of 2-3 here (a little skewed due to COVID), as the average wedding runs 20-30k... [1] https://www.theknot.com/content/average-wedding-cost https://www.theknot.com/content/average-wedding-cost