@UScitizen – I wondered about that too, like if you found enough money so that there’s really no way that anyone could have obtained that much cash legally, I wondered if the police would confiscate it. I wonder if one could even then report it to the IRS without the police coming and just taking it?
@tekn0lust – I agree with you, and I’m curious if you know for a fact that it is taxable, or if you’re just assuming, because that does seem logical to me that it would be. I guess my default thinking would be that I have to report this somehow, how would I go about doing so…I’d probably end up calling the IRS and asking them what to do. Which if I really did find money, that’s what I’d probably have done rather than post on here, but I’m a bit leery of just calling the IRS line and asking a hypothetical question like this, lest the agent on the other end decides I actually did find money…I have no money as it is, last thing I’d need is IRS troubles.
But nothelesss, I am curious about what if a person DID find a ton of money and just wanted to keep it, isn’t there some sort of threshold where if someone brings in more than $x in cash to a bank in a single transaction, the bank would have to report it to some regulatory agency and possibly the IRS, making it possible to stay under the radar if you broke up your deposits into smaller amounts? I would wonder if someone could theoretically open say 10 bank accounts, and deposit say a couple thousand dollars in cash once a week into each account until the full amount was in one account or another and still stay under the radar? One could probably also do things like buy money orders payable to their mortgage company or credit card companies if they stayed under a certain dollar figure and do that on a regular basis until those were paid off, and just not spend any of the money out of their checking accounts.
I’m kind of curious, if someone were in this situation and motivated to keep as much of the money as they could, and were thus motivated to try to slowly use this money instead of their income until it was gone, even if that took years, would it even be necessary for them to do so? I mean, if there’s no law on the books saying specifically that this kind of money is indeed “taxable income”, one wouldn’t even HAVE to do that. I just wonder because I assume if for example I have a yard sale and bring in $1,000, I can deposit that money in my bank, and I’m not going to ever have to answer for it. Or even if I sell my used car for 4 grand, I can put that money in the bank. Of if I win a few hundred bucks at a casino, not enough to make them W-2 me, but I still deposit a fair amount of cash. Or when you have an insurance claim…that comes by check, but could be a huge deposit and no one says anything. I wonder if there’s a threshold for cash vs. checks, and if it’s based on amount, or frequency of deposits, and if there’s any centralized source to know if you use multiple banks.
But of course, as you said, 11 years would get you back to a million, so assuming you take home less than $90k a year, it would probably take you longer than 11 years just to get that money into the bank via this method.
I also have to imagine that there are some pretty sophisticated ways to utilize large amounts of ill gotten cash, after all, drug dealers do it all the time, and I have to imagine that very few of them are paying taxes on all of their income. I have to figure people maybe set up fake companies, launder the money through them, and use write-offs and tax incentives for small business owners to reduce their tax liability to zero. It just leads me to all sorts of imagining, like what if a person went to all that effort and then found out that they didn’t even need to because found money by some weird loophole (like the tax code just never addressed it because it’s not something that happens with any frequency) was never taxable in the first place, so they went to all this trouble to conceal it and could have just deposited it in the bank.
It just occurred to me, I think people daydream all the time of just coming into a bunch of money unexpectedly, but I wonder about the mechanics of it…the kind of details you’d read in a book and think “wow, I never thought about that part of it.” Which is kind of one of those things…I have ideas that pop into my head from time to time where I think, “I should write a book about that”, and I think about the realities, but then never actually get around to writing the book. Like I have had this idea for a long time about some guy who hated his life, hated his wife and his job and just wanted to disappear, and he ends up on a business trip to NYC. He’s scheduled for a meeting in the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11, but he gets really drunk the night before and sleeps right through his alarm, and when he realizes what has happened, he uses it as an excuse to disappear, and lets everyone think he died. Hell, maybe this guy gets so drunk on the night of the 10th because he finds a duffle bag full of money?
But that’s as far as I get, because I think, well what would you do then? How would you go about living with an alias, getting some fake papers in this day and age? What would you do for money, could you completely fabricate a resume? How would you just go about the day to day living without getting busted? I could never write a book unless I could explain exactly how the person did what they did in a way that was plausible and consistent with reality, unfortunately, I just don’t even know how to begin hashing out all these hypotheticals. Hence questions like this one on Fluther!
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