Google tells me it’s “the practice of executing financial transactions such as making bank deposits in a specific pattern, calculated to avoid triggering financial institutions to file reports required by law”
But what does that actually look like, what methods are used beyond just making perfectly timed bank deposits?
In: Economics
In the United States, if you withdraw or deposit $10,000 or more in cash, you have to fill out a form called a CTR (currency transaction report). The form is simple, and is just a record of where the cash is going (moving to another bank, buying a car, putting it under the mattress, etc) or where the cash came from. The form gets filed with the IRS, just in case that person ever gets audited.
Structuring is when you deliberately avoid depositing or withdrawing $10,000, so that you can avoid filling out that form. Let’s say you sold a car for $50,000 in cash. Most people would take the cash and immediately deposit it all. Carrying $50k is dangerous. But, maybe you told the IRS you only sold it for $25,000 so you would pay less taxes. In that case, you might deposit $8,000 on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. so that no CTR ever gets filed. The IRS doesn’t look at individual bank accounts unless they’re auditing, so they’re none the wiser.
So there are reporting/documentation requirements for deposits over $10k to help fight terrorism/crime… structuring would be something like making multiple $9900 deposits to skirt around the reporting requirement. For example, former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was paying off some kid he’d molested and did so by making regular payments jut under the $10k threshold, hoping to avoid detection.
Banks in the US are required by law to report any deposits over $10,000 to the IRS.
So say I have $30k in cash that you obtained in a less than legal way. You want to put it in your bank account, but you don’t want the IRS knowing about it. So instead, you deposit it in 3 chunks of $9,999 and use the remaining $3 to go buy yourself a candy bar or something.
*That* is structuring.
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