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I see no reason to believe the underground or barter economy is any larger than it was a decade ago, or two decades, or three decades ago.
Agreed. That's pretty likely. The problem is that it's tough to measure something where the whole point is that it isn't measured. I know tons of people who have cash jobs. I also know tons of people who are self employed who have a lower cash-only rate. Need a plumber to replace a water heater? You'll get a big discount if you pay cash. The same is true for pretty much any trade.
When I worked for the bank, we had a businessman come in with a bunch of checks to deposit in his business account and he always had a bunch of checks made out to him personally to cash (you can't cash checks made out to a business unless you are the sole proprietor). The amounts of cash on these other checks added up to $5000 to $10,000 every week. I imagine the conversation between businessman and customer went something like this: You make your check out to me personally instead of out to the business and I'll take xx% off your bill.
This way the businessman got his money and didn't pay taxes on it as a business. It was a scam, pure and simple. I have no doubt the manager knew what he was doing, but she just looked the other way and there was nothing we could do as tellers.
The only way this sort of thing gets caught is if one of the people who paid the businessman uses his check as a deduction and an auditor gets suspicious, then does an audit of the business to see if the check was indeed deposited in a business account and declared as income. And the chances of that happening are very slim.
When I worked for the bank, we had a businessman come in with a bunch of checks to deposit in his business account and he always had a bunch of checks made out to him personally to cash (you can't cash checks made out to a business unless you are the sole proprietor). The amounts of cash on these other checks added up to $5000 to $10,000 every week. I imagine the conversation between businessman and customer went something like this: You make your check out to me personally instead of out to the business and I'll take xx% off your bill.
This way the businessman got his money and didn't pay taxes on it as a business. It was a scam, pure and simple. I have no doubt the manager knew what he was doing, but she just looked the other way and there was nothing we could do as tellers.
The only way this sort of thing gets caught is if one of the people who paid the businessman uses his check as a deduction and an auditor gets suspicious, then does an audit of the business to see if the check was indeed deposited in a business account and declared as income. And the chances of that happening are very slim.
Your bank should report those transactions to the IRS under the bank secrecy act, no?
Many illegals choose not to file tax returns. Just as they choose not to go to the emergency room when they or family members are sick and don't call or speak to police or fire officials when they really ought to. Their status forces illegals to try to lay low, fly below the radar, and generally avoid contact with "the system" as much as they can.
Employers on the other hand have no choice but to deal regularly with ICE and the IRS, both on their own behalf and on behalf of every single employee who reports for work in the morning. As an employer, you have to fill out an I-9 for each of your employees. You also have to withhold and remit income and payroll taxes for each employee on a regular basis. Penalties for lack of compliance are severe. If you are some shady, no-account, pop-up, fly-by-night, meth lab operator willing to go on the lam at the drop of a hat, these rules might not matter much to you. If like most businesses, you are making an actual effort to maintain and grow the long-term presence of your company in the community, then you would likely take these rules very seriously indeed. You would in that case end up treating all your employees exactly the same, because not doing so would tell all the wrong people that you are knowingly violating the law. This is part and parcel of how the great majority of both legals and illegals end up paying the taxes that they owe.
No, it's openly available to all who care to go look for it.
Your bank should report those transactions to the IRS under the bank secrecy act, no?
Cash transactions only get reported if they are over $10,000 in a single day. We could have reported them as "suspicious transactions". This is if a person cashes, say, a $9900 check and the bank thinks he's doing this to avoid having his cash reported. At this point, you don't have to ask the customer for any info and he doesn't even have to know the bank is doing it, as you can fill this particular form out after the customer leaves the bank.
That should have been done, definitely. But the manager would have to be the one to OK it and she wasn't ever going to do that, because this businessman was a friend of hers and more to the point, the bank would have lost a customer if she had done it. And God forbid that happen.
You target employers, force a e-verify. Massive fines and jail for violations. Pretty simply. You start placing the burden of hiring on employers where it should be. The illegal jobs mostly dry up. This won't change the entrepreneurs working for cash but nothing short of a cashless society will fix that. Its coming, just not soon enough. That is more of an IRS problem that will be solved with time.
Then you grant amnesty to everyone here. Legalize them immediately. Unlimited look back and 10 years forward for violent felony type charges and or major white collar crimes, instant boot out of the country. Sort of conditional citizenship. Extend the same to any person wanting to come here. We are violent enough with importing more. These types tend to be in and out of the system, it should be trivial to find them and get them to ICE. Any officer or department that fails to follow this law will be brought up on federal charges themselves.
The cost to deport, deal with the legalities and the practicalities are just ridiculous to keep kicking the can down the road or to try and round everyone up and get rid of them. Besides most are good people, poor and yet statistically commit similar crime to whites. These are folks we should be taking, educating and helping. They are mostly hard workers playing a card game with limited cards and doing ok.
Then you adjust our immigration policies to not require lawyers, several years and thousands of dollars. I have family that recently went through it and it is ridiculous. They even qualified for a fast pass version because of religious reasons which I thought was pretty ridiculous. The current system of people just overstaying their visas isn't working. We should make the process easier but on the flip side it should also be much faster and easier to remove those that are consistent trouble makers. How you do that is making it easy to keep track of everyone just like every other citizen or green card holder. Our current system is pants on the head retarded.
You continue to vet people from nations that statistically contribute to global terror and limit those numbers as appropriate. This isn't a free pass for everyone in the world but good people from good areas should be encouraged and it made easier to come here.
The underground economy or black market has always been there as long as there are taxes to be paid. I bet if you went back in time to ancient Rome, you would find a chariot repair shop willing to work under the table.
Its not fair to those of us who pay our taxes, but fighting it is like swiming upstream.
The problem can be fixed in a heartbeat, but the agricultural and other powerful interests that took us down this road are still winning. Even sillier they have helped finance campaigns and ads that support the illegal aliens and stir up public sentiment. All this because the agricultural interest subverted the laws and used illegal aliens. And the politicians and government officials allowed them to do so. Now we are all paying the price and those who broke the laws have been in effect pardoned. Then if any of us oppose this illegal behavior, we get called racist. Sometimes it is really difficult to understand our crazy world. The fix is clear. Fine those who hire illegals. No deportation, no massive wall, no other efforts needed.
Quite a lot of actual tax fraud could be beaten down by more rigorous 1099 matching regimes. Many were included as part of funding for PPACA, but rushing in to defend tax cheats, the GOP managed to get most of these controls repealed.
Quite a lot of actual tax fraud could be beaten down by more rigorous 1099 matching regimes. Many were included as part of funding for PPACA, but rushing in to defend tax cheats, the GOP managed to get most of these controls repealed.
What was proposed would have been an extreme hardship on small businesses, it was a bad idea.
Drop the income tax and go with a national sales tax.
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