Deb V

Sell your car for cash and deposit it, and your bank reports you to the federal government. Move $5,000 in a way a teller doesn’t like, and the bank can file a suspicious activity report on you. If anyone at the bank tells you it happened, they’ve committed a federal crime. You find out when your account gets closed, if you ever find out at all. Banks spend $59 billion complying with the Bank Secrecy Act. They filed 28.7 million reports on Americans. Those reports tipped off 275 investigations. It started in 1968, when a Texas congressman named Wright Patman held a hearing about secret Swiss bank accounts. Patman claimed Americans were using them for tax evasion, stolen Treasury bills, corporate kickbacks and securities fraud. His star witness, U.S. attorney Robert Morgenthau, told Congress that the millions of Americans vacationing in Europe were finding foreign banks ready to help them commit crimes. Members of Congress warned that the bill would gut the privacy of bank customers, choke honest commerce and hand the Treasury Secretary far too much power. They were right. It passed anyway. Richard Nixon signed the Bank Secrecy Act in October 1970, twenty months before his own men were caught breaking into the Watergate. Treasury set the reporting line at $10,000 in 1972 and has never moved it. That is about $80,000 in today’s money after inflation, so the net drops lower every year Congress does nothing. In 1986 Congress made it a crime to keep your deposits under the line on purpose, which means the line catches you whether you cross it or not. By 1996 banks were filing suspicious activity reports on their own customers for anything over $5,000 that looked off to them. After September 11 the Patriot Act bolted eleven more sections onto the law, and last year the GENIUS Act extended the same surveillance to stablecoins. In 2012 banks filed 1,720 suspicious activity reports for every IRS investigation that came out of them. Over the next decade the reports nearly doubled and the investigations fell by half. Last year FinCEN ordered businesses in thirty zip codes along the southern border to report cash transactions as small as $200. One small business estimated it would go from filing nine reports a week to 50,000. A federal court in Texas found the order likely violated the Fourth Amendment and said it was like using a blunderbuss to target a fly. FinCEN answered by raising the line to $1,000 and stretching it over 126 zip codes and 3.2 million people. In 1974 Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in dissent that forcing a bank to photocopy your checks gives the government as much of a hand in the seizure as if it had sent someone to break into your home and copy them there. Even the justices who upheld the law warned that your financial records reveal your activities, your associations and your beliefs. Two years later, in United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not protect your bank records at all. Repeal the Bank Secrecy Act.