Chapter 47

Later that afternoon, a little past four, before the IRS closed for the day, Mr. Fox sent men to the IRS with the money and his full set of receipts and stubs for registration.

That was how Federation law worked. If you wanted to deposit more than five thousand dollars into a bank, you had to provide the bank with lawful proof.

What had to be proven was not that the money was genuine currency, but the manner in which it had been obtained, and proof that taxes had been paid on it.

Without that proof, the bank would not allow the cash to enter the banking system, and it would raise the monitoring level on the related accounts.

In the past, some people had tried to deal with such money by comparatively simple means. They would break ten thousand dollars into ten separate portions, have ten different people deposit them into ten different accounts, then transfer them all into one designated account.

Done that way, they could effectively slip past the Federation government’s Large Cash Transaction Regulation. Why, then, did people not simply rely on that method?

The answer was just as simple. Once concentrated bank transfers began to occur, the bank, judging the risk too high, would directly freeze both the sending and receiving accounts. The freeze would remain until both sides could provide sufficient proof that the money was legal.

The fact was, naturally, that they could not provide such proof. At that point, the bank would confiscate the funds, pay a special tax on them to the IRS on its own initiative, then swallow the rest whole.

If the account holder was dissatisfied, he could always sue. But when most people ran into this sort of problem, they ultimately chose to swallow the loss in silence. Better not to end up with the money gone and the man gone too.

It was not only the banks keeping an eye on accounts. The Federation FBI’s Financial Crimes Investigation Division watched them as well. Perhaps there truly were some lucky survivors, but far more were dragged out into the light.

Case after case, countless times over, had taught people the same lesson. They could break the law, but they could not refuse to pay tax.

Mr. Fox’s nephew and several of his men drove the box truck carrying the money to the IRS for registration. With the form now stamped by Sabine City’s tax registration office, they proceeded to the nearby Shengrong Bank, an old bank with a very long history, one of the Empire’s six great banks.