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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Completely seriously; while I’m sure essentially no one actually does, the IRS is not going to like network with the FBI or your local police department if you, for some reason, decide to pay taxes on your weed sale profits. Unless you report that you’re selling sex slaves they seriously could not care less.
I know it’s just a joke image but I do love the idea of someone who makes much of their money illegally but also has this very honorable commitment to paying their fair share in taxes.
If you're convicted of criminal activity you'd be smart to include that in your taxes. The last thing you need is to be convicted of tax fraud in addition to getting convicted of drug trafficking. If the government already has a record of you profiting from criminal activity, make sure you give them their cut.
As the joker once said:
More specifically the IRS field book discourages reporting illegal income to other agencies for basically everything besides terrorism. Also, when you file taxes there's a reason there's an "other income" field. Nobody expects you to list "MS-13" as your employer. You can report money earned from illegal activities to avoid additional federal charges being tacked on
Exactly. I’ve seen such a gigantic rise in like “conspiracy-everything” posts online (wherein people seemingly assume that everything ever done by the government is in some way a poorly concealed conspiracy) and i think anyone who has actually worked under government funding can pretty quickly attest that this just… isn’t how things work.
All these “little conspiracies” operate under the assumption that the US government is this hyper-connected, ultra advanced and professional shadowy room where everyone is out to get non-government employees for vague purposes (“they just want to have control… man…”.)
When really, 99% of government employees are like some guy or gal you went to high school with who is working in a cubicle because the benefits are pretty decent
Anyway, not to make the joke post too serious. I just always worry the naively minded might take posts like this too seriously lol
The number of people in government who get promoted because they're awful and that's the easiest way for their boss to be rid of them...
In my experience this is essentially never the case. I struggle to think of a circumstance where it would be
In some cases I've witnessed they were swapped in a position where they "couldn't make things worse". Maybe there were some benefits attached toake the new position a little more attractive, but definitely not a promotion.
And reporting "other income" wouldn't flag you as a likely criminal anyway, unless it was a massive amount. They don't know if you got it from selling weed, picking pockets, or mowing your neighbor's lawn (no, Bill is not going to submit a form 1099 for you, he's just going to hire a professional lawn service instead if you're going to be weird about it).
IRS isn't a snitch
There’s, perhaps, a more practical explanation. As I’ve read before (in some other phrasing): If you’re going to commit a crime, commit only one at a time.
In this case, if you’re going to make your money illegally, for goodness’ sake, don’t evade taxes.
Seriously though, some people have almost pulled off some crazy illegal shit and then got caught because a headlight was out or someone was doing something stupid. If you're going to commit crime, one at a time.
Timothy McVeigh was pulled over for driving without a license plate an hour and a half after blowing up the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.
From the Wikipedia article
He likely would always have been caught, but he got picked up quick because of that.
This is absolutely it.
Its just one less way that they can come at you, it also means its harder for them to confiscate your property as proceeds of crime.
Also on virtually every gangster or crime movie/series there is either a bad guy getting caught by irs(?) agents for tax evasion, or plays it super safe and pays them diligently to avoid that very scenario.
Wasn't that one woman who lied about cancer and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars fully brought down for tax evasion because they couldn't really get her on much else? The scamanda woman
Actually what happened is that some criminal got caught. And in addition to everything, he was accused of tax fraud. He successfully argued though, that because there wasn’t a field to properly declare his taxes, rhat he would be committing fraud by lying about his income, and as such had no option. This is what led to those fields to exist
Kudos to whoever that was. It's not easy to beat the IRS
The premise of it is basically to have an easier way to prosecute organized crime since those folks rarely are keeping honest books.
It isn't. (pdf)
I am obviously not claiming the image is fake, I’m claiming it’s being used in a joking context
Also you're allowed to plead the fifth on the origin of the income IIRC, though honestly that's just as likely to get you looked at by the FBI/local constabulary.
On the other hand if you're making enough money illegally to feel the need to declare it on your taxes (either for ethical reasons or because you don't want to get done like Al Capone) law enforcement is probably already looking at you.
The IRS doesn't report it to the FBI because that's not their job. If you're already under investigation and the FBI asks, they'll hand over the info, but they won't initiate anything, they just want their cut.
This is just my D&D character. He's an accountant for a thieves' guild
Slightly related question: is money laundering, in itself, illegal?
Like, say I have $1000 from my regular W-2 job, taxes paid.
I launder it through a bunch of accounts. Is that illegal?
Or is it the mixing with dirty funds that makes it illegal?
Not sure you can “launder” clean money.
If you get paid money legally and just… transfer it a bunch through various banking accounts or similar. That is obviously not illegal in any way.
If you get paid money legally and then say, “buy a lot of car washes” at the car wash your cousin owns and then he pays you the money back and you two don’t report that to the IRS, that would be tax fraud (though laws on “gifting” money get pretty vague)
Basically, it’s really hard to somehow illegally “launder” clean money
I think it was an episode of Suits or something similar where a guy was divorcing his wife but wanted to hide certain legal assets but hide it from his wife.
The episode made it sound like he had to launder the money so it looked like, on paper, it didn't belong to him and it implied that it wasn't legal but they did it anyway. I can't remember the details but basically why I asked.
If it's legal money, then you aren't laundering it. Transferring money you've obtained legally is just transferring money. It's only money laundering by definition if the money was illegally gained.
… so far. Just wait til fascists are in control, and they kill all social programs then reallocate those resources to shit like that. The German government did that in the late 30s. They started using all government and private records to root out undesirables.
Ten years ago I wouldn’t have worried either, but now? I wouldn’t give my information to anyone.
The grifters have succeeded 100% if you think paying taxes is honourable in any way shape or form, especially in a declining empire that fields the most onerous army in history.
I like clean water, good weather forecasts, and I want to fix the bridges.
If you think the State, choosing to ignore certain negative externalities through regulations — like water pollution — by not holding the guilty parties accountable and pushing up pollution targets, is going to get you clean water, as opposed to any other system where accountability is not distorted by coercitive rules that are almost impossible to challenge: I don't know how any more naive that position could be. When pollution is not associated with having to pay for cleanup and the financial consequences are negligible, even the stock market picks up on it and publicised major pollution events don't mean a company's valuation plummets.
I didn't know weather forecasts and bridges were more difficult for people not paid by taxes.
Are you suggesting a privatized National Weather Service and toll bridges would be better? If so, I have a nice bear-ridden town in New Hampshire you might like to move to.
Regulations are exactly how you deal with negative externalities.The EPA makes corporations pay for reducing pollution and cleanup. Why do you think corporations target EPA so much? Because EPA costs them money. Never hear any corporations whining about that free taxpayer-funded geological data coming out of USGS
Yes, a good chunk of the American tax income goes to pretty bad stuff, but A. not all of us are American, and B. not all of that tax goes to bad stuff
The IRS is in the USA.
You can't choose where tax goes to. One penny for child murder to one dollar for cancer research is still not making the child murder acceptable. With that ratio the US would never wage war.
Taxation is not voluntary and is deployed with violence. The US also wants control of the world's financial institutions to be able to tax any US person in the world without too much difficulty.
Charitable donations are tax deductible, your goal should be to spend your entire tax return on charity so your tax is at worst an interest free loan to the government and at best it might actually do some good in the world.
Fuck no, charity sucks for many things.
Let’s take the duty of a state, such as caring for its citizens and divide it up amongst 1000s of little groups each with highly paid CEOs, CFOs, and COOs and huge costs spent on advertising and fundraising! Oh and you get zero democratic say in these organisations or how they’re run.
I’d rather see my money going towards healthcare, education, social services, etc.
Idk man I’ve worked in social services under a multitude of government funded grants and I’m pretty sure tax evasion is extremely bad for many of the homeless veterans / abused children / etc I’ve worked with who are dependent on said grants.
Because when the Fed sends trillions of dollars into the money supply and the federal and State governments create budgets they are less responsible than people doing their best to give the minimal required amount that won't get goons sent to their house to kidnap them?
… what..?
what the hell does decline have to do with the morals of it? In any case, while there are certainly misused funds, the truth of the matter is that it is vitally important to keep society functioning, and that doing this requires a lot of money. If not taxes, where else do you propose this funding come?
An empire in decline is historically more morally degenerate and bloated by endless bureaucracy that feeds off the declining numbers of productive enterprises they can tax.
Society and the State are not the same. How can it be true that taxation is vitally important to make society function then?
Voluntary funding through free markets under common law agreed upon by all parties in contractual relationships.