Typically they will just lie about sales right, so couldnt tax authorities just monitor the number of people going in and out of businesses where they can track easily sales from the outside?(for example barber shop) Then they could just shut down the operation easily by proving fraud? I might be stupid here but it doesn’t make sense to me
In: 4
TV would have you believe that once someone is identified as a red flag, they simply “stake it out” for a few weeks and then they bust the guy. A real IRS operation is expensive, and it has to justify it’s existence by having a regular series of successful “gets” over the course of a year.
It’s a bunch of accountants going through line after line of revenues, profits and losses, purchase orders, etc. They generally go after mid sized fish. Big enough to be a good bust, and small enough to not have a staff of lawyers that can fight in the courts.
If you had some illegal cash you wanted to launder, just be patient and start three small businesses that are LLC’s and are independent of each other. Laundering cash with one large business is a rookie mistake, and it’s failure is due to being impatient, and being in a hurry.
Watch Ozark and see how much time and effort was put into laundering and it was just constant adjustments and expansions to make it work.
You think the IRS has enough people to put one next to every door of every business in the country? That is simply not the case.
>couldnt tax authorities just monitor the number of people going in and out of businesses where they can track easily sales from the outside?
2 people a day on the team, plus the rental of a van (suspicious) or property nearby is probably going to cost a thousand bucks a day. The eventual prosecution will require a leal team, court etc.
A 2 man barber shop can probably claim 40 haircuts a day, at 20 bucks that’s a max of $800/day being laundered… that’s a very expensive cost to shut down a small money launderer.
>so couldnt tax authorities just monitor the number of people going in and out of businesses where they can track easily sales from the outside?
Sure, all they have to do is hire *so many people* that they can afford to have people sitting in a car all day long watching a store. And all of those people need to work for free, because the agency has a limited budget and already spends its funding for the rest of its staff. And then they just have to trust that the reports coming from this army of unpaid volunteers is accurate, and that there’s *no way* that the criminals would simply pay them off.
Latest Answers