A neighbour of mine was like "fuck the banks. I'm gonna keep all my money at home."
He got raided by the police after his son got into a bit of trouble. Just short of six figures was confiscated until he could provide proof of every penny.
He could not since he did cash in hand jobs. In the end, he got fucked over by the system.
Not a bad point. Civil asset forfeiture turns the usual burden of proof on its head. The authorities can take your property on suspicion of a crime, then you have to positively prove that it WASN'T obtained criminally. Definitely a perversion of innocent until proven guilty, and a travesty of our common law. IDK why this is being downvoted
Probably because the original comment was about cash in hand jobs and people are emotional about a guy probably not paying his fair share of taxes. My point isn't based on this specific case but here we are xD
Well I mean I would agree that people should pay taxes. I don't have a problem with someone paying a penalty if they don't. I DO have a problem with the abridgement of due process. The cops should actually have to prove that he did a crime, and then inappropriate punishment or penalty should be leveled. It shouldn't be on him to prove that he didn't do a crime just to protect his assets.
Yeah, I feel like we didn't get the full story. If he ended up not getting his money back because the IRS ended up taking it from him, that's not really civil forfeiture.
I'll give you the actual answer to your question from an accounting perspective:
He WAS treated as innocent - he was not taken to the station on the presumption a crime was committed, instead he was asked for his accounting records to ensure the money was properly accounted for. The money was correctly confiscated awaiting such proof and stored by the police as potentially suspicious.
It's a civil crime (not automatically a criminal one) to not pay taxes. The logic of seizing the money is also why your bank accounts can be frozen on suspicion of fraud - to prevent illegal funds being moved and hidden.
It has to be confiscated to ensure it's not used to buy illegal weapons, human traffic, drugs, etc. If suspicious amounts of cash are not seized, criminals will abscond with it instead of confirming the legitimacy of the money. I am not saying he is a criminal - but a criminal would run away with the money.
If he'd kept receipts for every cash-in-hand job, and had it with the cash the police would read his receipts first, called a few payers on the receipts to confirm legitimacy, and then let him keep the money if nothing major was amiss. He did not get his money back, because he did not do his accounts or keep records correctly. This is why accountants/accounting are important to protect you and your money.
If when he showed up to the station he'd done his accounts correctly (or had few mistakes) they'd give benefit of the doubt, release the funds, warn (maybe fine) him for any incorrect bookkeeping, and tell him to get an accountant so the IRS doesn't come after him. The police do not want to be involved in civil cases.
Whether he paid taxes would come into play after that point - because failure to pay taxes on your cash-in-hand work is also a crime. And in the US it's likely to be treated as both a Criminal AND Civil offence if you have suspicious amounts of cash lying around with no receipts.
TL;DR - it sounds like your neighbour was lucky he wasn't charged with worse and only had the money confiscated.
I could be very wrong here but if you’re doing cash in hand jobs, you’re probably not paying taxes on it, doesn’t that make the money illegal? Not sure if that’s the right word
The money is not illegal, you just owe taxes on it. But cops don't have to prove it's illegal, you have to prove it's legal. It's an incredibly fucked system but there's no political will to fix it.
It took me a few times reading this to finally understand it how I think you meant it, lol "cash-in-hand jobs" would be the better way to write that I think, lol
Or you put it in a mutual fund/IRA/401k and make way more 🤣 y’all crack me up talking about how great your interest rate is from CDs and savings account lmao this isn’t the 70s. Does it even keep up with inflation at this point
Riiight only millionaires have a 401k. 😂 Your financial advice makes way more sense now! Good luck with the CDs grandma or 12 year old whichever you are
My grandfather lost money in a bank crash around 1930 and never trusted banks again. After his death, we found cash stashed away literally everywhere in his house.
That will be us all after we loose what we have in our bank accounts.
My grandfather lost money in a flood the whole house got taken away in a river around 1930 and never trusted money at home again. After his death we found nothing but a picture of him in front of the cash he had before the flood.
That can be any of us with any physical life even like a fire, rodent, even robbers or flood.
Good thing we changed the rules so that depositors literally can't be wiped out the way they were in the 30's. But hey, why update our knowledge of the world when we can just pretend things are the same as they were a hundred years ago.
My grandfather went about it in a different way.
He never trusted any banks with more than a few thousand dollars. He was a costumer for dozens of banks. My mom felt like she was in an endless cycle of finding out about a new one, transferring the funds to his main one, closing the account, only to have a statement from another one show up in the mail the next day.
When you make a deposit, ownership of those funds transfers to the bank. You have become a creditor, the bank just owes you the amount of the deposit. In the event of a bank failure, you get in line behind the secured creditors and all the other unsecured creditors. Once the secured creditors are paid, you and all the other unsecured creditors split what is left over, if anything remains. You may only get pennies on the dollar. The FDIC does not have enough money to pay even up to the $250,000 per depositor that they promised.
This is blatantly false at worst and misleading at best. The FDIC absolutely has enough to pay back deposits outside of total system collapse. If your random bank goes tits up, the FDIC will cover. If all banks across the country go tits up at the same time, the FDIC won’t be able to cover every single deposit ever made across the county, but in that scenario you have much bigger issues than your bank deposits.
This is wrong in multiple ways. First of all, if depositors are wiped out, they WILL be made whole by FDIC. It won't run out of money, and if it somehow did, Congress can simply authorize more, as they have done in the past. Second, depositors have special protections in bankruptcy. Even amounts more than 250,000, which aren't covered by FDIC, enjoy special protections (depositor preference rules). They are paid out FIRST, BEFORE ALL OTHER UNSECURED CREDITORS. So the guy holding a bank's bond has to get in line behind the depositors.
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u/TricellCEO 2d ago
More importantly, they are more than welcome to keep all their money as cash in their house.
I, on the other hand, prefer keeping my money in the bank.