Imagine living in a world where every one of your noncash financial transactions—a restaurant meal, a Venmo transfer to a friend, maybe some bitcoin bought on the dips—was automatically reported to a beefed-up, audit-hungry IRS.
That dystopia will become a reality if President Joe Biden gets his way. Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and key Capitol Hill allies such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) are pushing a vast, intrusive financial surveillance system in the name of closing the “tax gap.”
But don’t worry: There’s no need to fear if you’ve got nothing to hide.
“For already compliant taxpayers, the only effect of this regime is to provide easy access to summary information on financial accounts and to decrease the likelihood of costly ‘no fault’ examinations,” the Treasury Department said this May in a nakedly authoritarian document called “The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda.” But “for noncompliant taxpayers,” the department continues, “this regime would encourage voluntary compliance as evaders realize that the risk of evasion being detected has risen noticeably.”
The administration’s proposed “comprehensive financial account reporting regime” would dramatically increase the types of financial institutions and transactions exposed to the feds’ prying eyes. “All business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts,” would be forced to “report gross inflows and outflows” to the IRS. And not just bank accounts: The dragnet would now include PayPal, settlement companies, and “crypto asset exchanges,” for starters.
The new domestic surveillance program, which requires congressional approval, is one prong of a tripartite strategy for transforming the entire global financial system into a harmonious, haven-free collection funnel to the IRS. The second part, which has taken up the bulk of Biden’s multilateral diplomacy thus far, is getting the industrialized world to agree on a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent, while setting up a system to prevent multinational companies from registering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions.
Cutting corporate taxes is “a self-defeating competition,” Yellen said in April, “and neither President Biden nor I are interested in participating in it anymore. We want to change the game.”
That has been happening to US citizens abroad for a very long time.
A new one, a true killer, that was put in a couple of years ago is this: if you own a business or part thereof that has made a profit, but have reinvested the profit in the business, as business owners do when you want to grow your business, you have to pay Uncle Sam tax on it as personal income even if you have not taken it out. You are taxed on the retained earnings of your business, in addition to corporate income tax. That is unheard of.
It is like this – you own shares that go up in price. Even though you have not sold them, you must pay tax on the increase anyway. What happens if they later drop in price? Too bad for you.
This shit is coming to you soon. They test this stuff on expats first.
I just use deprecation. 250k / year max.
“show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime” Lavrentiy Beria
I assume it has been happening for a very long time and with the use of AI, they do not need a “a beefed-up, audit-hungry IRS” to go after anyone whose profile looks questionable.
They will sell it by saying that they are going after rich people. (anyone with a job?)
All premised on the belief (and reality) that most people use one name only…
Multiple names, multiple corporate entities,multiple nationalities, and the complexity of the game increases exponentially.
They will enslave the average middle class.
The ‘criminals’ will be unaffected.
They put the bank accounts for monitoring at $600 or more. So everyone. The ONLY ones not affected will be those so poor that they have nothing to steal, quite literally.
But rest assured, those making the rules will have crafted an escape for themselves and their richest ‘donors’. They know that people will be to lazy to hold them to account. They also know the propaganda wing will introduce a new shiny and everyone will segway and forget about the blatant robbery going on in front of your eyes. After all, who you gonna believe, them or your lying eyes.