The government is famous for taking a mile (or more) when you give them an inch.
Case in point is their latest attempt to get into our personal lives without proper authority or reason.
As a part of the multi-trillion dollar reconciliation bill before Congress now, President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen were pushing for an alert from banks to the IRS for any account with gross annual inflows and outflows of $600 or more in a year.
After pushback from Republicans in Congress and banks who would be faced with the task of reporting this information on their customers to the IRS, Biden and Yellen backed down . . . just a little bit.
Their new number for banks to report is $10,000 per year.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), normally a defender of individual privacy rights, told reporters, "This is about wealthy business owners at the tippy top of the top.”
So he’s saying someone with $10,000 or more of annual inflow and outflow from their bank account in a given year is at the “tippy top of the top” of Americans?
Yellen put out a statement that "today’s new proposal reflects the Administration’s strong belief that we should zero in on those at the top of the income scale who don’t pay the taxes they owe, while protecting American workers by setting the bank account threshold at $10,000 and providing an exemption for wage earners like teachers and firefighters."
Under the guise of catching tax cheats at the “tippy top of the top,” Biden, Yellen, and other pro-taxers want your bank to report you to the IRS because you might not be paying your “fair share.”
What they are all ignoring is this pesky thing called the United States Constitution which protects Americans from this sort of thing without a proper reason, probable cause, and a warrant.
The Fourth Amendment states, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
So it doesn’t matter whether the reporting threshold is $600, $10,000, or $25 billion. If the government wants your bank to report on you, they need to provide a good reason and probable cause to ask for and access your personal and private information.
Call your U.S. Senators and your U.S. Representative today at 202-224-3121 and tell them to remove this reporting requirement entirely from all legislation.
Print 
PDF