Speaker Nancy Pelosi likes to keep an eye on things.
Well, us. She likes to keep an eye on us — especially what we’re doing with the money in our bank accounts.
Pelosi is what happens when the “keep your eyes on your own paper” kid grows up never having learned her lesson.
Pelosi defended a proposal to increase the amount of information financial institutions report to the IRS about bank accounts, indicating the proposal would be a part of Democrats’ social-spending package, The Hill reported.
Republican lawmakers and banking groups have been ramping up criticism of the proposal recently.
“Yes there are concerns that some people have, but if people are breaking the law and not paying their taxes, one way to track them is through the banking measure,” Pelosi said during a press conference.
Concerns like privacy, overreaching government surveillance of private citizens, and a little something called the Fourth Amendment and its protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
The Biden administration has proposed requiring banks to report aggregate inflows and outflows of bank accounts to the IRS, in instances where accounts have flows exceeding $600.
Buy a beater car for $2,000, and you’ve just triggered an IRS alarm.
Democratic lawmakers have a tentative deal to raise that threshold to $10,000, and to exempt regular wage payments. Pelosi noted that the $600 threshold is not set in stone.
“That’s a negotiation that will go on as to what the amount is,” she said.
The amount is not the point.
It’s the intrusion, and banks say their advocacy efforts against the proposal has resulted in an inundation of customer complaints about the idea, the New York Times reported. There will be more complaints, undoubtedly.
It isn’t that the surveillance is tied to national security, or tracking the assets of terrorist organizations — far from it.
This is part of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion social spending package in that they realized that “taxing the rich” is more of a catchy slogan than a workable plan. The numbers didn’t add up, and Operation Go Through People’s Bank Accounts was born.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted as much when the plan was recently announced. Yellen wrote in a letter to Congress, the government has “a shortage of necessary funds for key national priorities.” Biden officials estimate this bank account reporting plan could bring in upward of $400 billion over a decade.
There is no real need to flag accounts — there is already a legal provision to do so, and it’s been around since 1970. It’s called the Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act of 1970 (aka the “Bank Secrecy Act”), which requires U.S. financial institutions to assist U.S. government agencies to detect and prevent money laundering. Specifically, it requires financial institutions to keep records of cash purchases of negotiable instruments, file reports of cash transactions exceeding $10,000, and to report suspicious activity that might signify money laundering, tax evasion or other criminal activities.
So the tax cheats? They’ve got an Act for that.
This is just a gawk and grab to fund the progressives’ spending spree.
