3 ms·

Australia tried to introduce a similar thing with reporting of cash transactions of AUD10,000 except buying a car. https://treasury.gov.au/policy-topics/economy

Australia tried to introduce a similar thing with reporting of cash transactions of AUD10,000 except buying a car. https://treasury.gov.au/policy-topics/economy/black-economy https://treasury.gov.au/policy-topics/economy/black-economy The proposal died, I'm not sure why. Personally I wouldn't be affected, but apparently 3% of Australia's GDP is in the "black economy".

netsharc 4y ago
> reporting of cash transactions of AUD10,000 except buying a car. I wonder if the exception is easily abused. "Here's a 1980's beater and a suitcase which does not contain cocaine, that'll be 30 thousand dollars please!".
- pas 4y ago
  there's still a paper trail for buying a car (plus unreasonable prices stick out more than simply reporting to buy art in cash or whatever)
beagle3 4y ago
The Israeli version is not new. It was introduced 3 years ago (perhaps more?) with the sums that are legal to transact in cash reducing every year or so. At first, it was sums that only affected people who were (likely) doing things illegally (e.g. drugs, bribes, tax evasion, money laundering, etc). So there was little to no protest -- very few people realized where this was going. Now, it basically affects everyone - the current threshold is in the between minimum wage and average wage, closer to minimum, with exceptions for effectively 5-year-or-older-common-cars and a couple more things. In a couple of years, the threshold would likely be lower than minimum wage (either by rule change, or by inflation that would bring minimum wage above current threshold), and at that point, the threshold would be "money you can give your kids to buy to stuff for themselves at the store, and not much more". Slow boil, works great on populations.
- from 4y ago
  Related: The $10,000 reporting threshold in the US has not been updated since the 70s. There have been multiple bipartisan attempts to update it to $20-30k (which is still half of what it should be according to CPI) but for some reason they have not gone anywhere. Most CTRs are basically spam at this point. A lot of people are seeing that the current BSA system incentivizes filling out SARs on everything possible to absolve yourself of liability instead of providing actionable intelligence but no one wants to change anything because they will look "soft" on crime/terrorism/Russia/whatever nonsense. Something like 95%+ of SARs don't result in any sort of criminal referral which is a pretty bad false positive rate in my view.

netsharc 4y ago

> reporting of cash transactions of AUD10,000 except buying a car. I wonder if the exception is easily abused. "Here's a 1980's beater and a suitcase which does not contain cocaine, that'll be 30 thousand dollars please!".

pas 4y ago
there's still a paper trail for buying a car (plus unreasonable prices stick out more than simply reporting to buy art in cash or whatever)

beagle3 4y ago

The Israeli version is not new. It was introduced 3 years ago (perhaps more?) with the sums that are legal to transact in cash reducing every year or so. At first, it was sums that only affected people who were (likely) doing things illegally (e.g. drugs, bribes, tax evasion, money laundering, etc). So there was little to no protest -- very few people realized where this was going. Now, it basically affects everyone - the current threshold is in the between minimum wage and average wage, closer to minimum, with exceptions for effectively 5-year-or-older-common-cars and a couple more things. In a couple of years, the threshold would likely be lower than minimum wage (either by rule change, or by inflation that would bring minimum wage above current threshold), and at that point, the threshold would be "money you can give your kids to buy to stuff for themselves at the store, and not much more". Slow boil, works great on populations.

from 4y ago
Related: The $10,000 reporting threshold in the US has not been updated since the 70s. There have been multiple bipartisan attempts to update it to $20-30k (which is still half of what it should be according to CPI) but for some reason they have not gone anywhere. Most CTRs are basically spam at this point. A lot of people are seeing that the current BSA system incentivizes filling out SARs on everything possible to absolve yourself of liability instead of providing actionable intelligence but no one wants to change anything because they will look "soft" on crime/terrorism/Russia/whatever nonsense. Something like 95%+ of SARs don't result in any sort of criminal referral which is a pretty bad false positive rate in my view.