Washington, DC -- The capital of OUR country!

My father watched as his friends died in WW II, and I watched as my friends died in Vietnam. None of them died for the Mexican Flag. Everyone died for the U.S. flag.

Just this week, here in Texas, a student raised a Mexican flag on a school flag pole; another student took it down. Guess who was expelled…the kid who took it down. Kids in high school in California were sent home this week on Cinco de Mayo because they wore T-shirts with the American flag printed on them.

Enough is enough.

The below e-mail message needs to be viewed by every American; and every American needs to stand up for America.

We’ve bent over to appease the America-haters long enough. I’m taking a stand. I’m standing up because the hundreds of thousands who died fighting in wars for this country, and for the U.S. flag can’t stand up. If you agree, stand up with me. If you disagree, please let me know. I will gladly remove you from my e-mail list. And shame on anyone who tries to make this a racist message.

Let me make this perfectly clear!

THIS IS MY COUNTRY!

And, because I make This statement

DOES NOT

Mean I’m against immigration!!!

YOU ARE WELCOME HERE, IN MY COUNTRY!

Welcome! To come through legally:

1. Get a sponsor!

2. Get a place to lay your head!

3. Get a job!

4. Live By OUR Rules!

5. Pay YOUR Taxes!

And

6. Learn the LANGUAGE like immigrants

have in the past!!!

AND

7. Please don’t demand that we hand over our lifetime

savings of Social Security Funds to you.

If you don’t want to forward this for fear of offending someone,

Then YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM!

When will AMERICANS STOP giving away THEIR RIGHTS???

We’ve gone so far the other way…

bent over backwards not to offend anyone.

But it seems no one cares about the

AMERICAN CITIZEN

that’s being offended!

WAKE UP America !!!

If You agree…. Pass this on.

If You don’t agree.. Delete It!!!

 Here is an article from an expert in asset recovery. Mr. Adams wrote, and owns copyright to the article.

Featured Article

High Dollar Cash Depositors Can Bring Risks Along With Earnings

By Colby Adams

A small bodega in a Texas border town dealing solely in cash and depositing modest profits into its local community bank suddenly triples its monthly revenue. A high net worth client at a large commercial bank in Miami begins making $9,000 cash deposits into his business account. A potential customer wants to open an account with a small community bank in which she will deposit $1 million in cash every month.

Under U.S. regulations, all three scenarios would merit compliance scrutiny, as well as raise questions of whether banks should accept the deposits at all. But while high-dollar cash transactions can be at risk for money laundering, placing limits on cash deposits or prohibiting them altogether isn’t financially feasible for many institutions.

“Cash can, counterintuitively, be very expensive for a bank, so the first thing to ask is, can you handle the business?” said Lisandro Quintana, a Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and Office of Foreign Assets Control compliance officer at San Diego National Bank who monitors several accounts for cash-intensive businesses.

In addition to requiring investments in armored transport and cash vault services, high-volume cash deposits also require financial institutions to account for additional teller time, as well as file currency transaction reports and conduct time-consuming onsite visits of the clients.

To go above and beyond the normal checks, compliance officers should ask a client to show two years of past tax returns to establish the value of the business in relation to account activity, aid [sic] Quintana.

In some cases, compliance officers should also “think outside of the BSA manual” by taking advantage of the skills of other bank officials, said Quintana.

“I had our bank’s commercial lending officer do a financial analysis of an auto dealer because they have expertise to analyze financial statements and tax returns to a depth that most compliance departments can’t,” said Quintana. “It turns out he was selling his cars at $200 a pop.”

Placing alerts on cash deposits over a certain threshold, as well as requiring preapproval from a compliance officer or bank supervisor for wire transfers over a specific amount, may also be helpful, according to Aaron Kahler, a former bank compliance officer and founder of Kahler Forensic Solutions, a New York City-based consultancy.

These steps are necessitated by the fact criminals and narco-traffickers to launder money domestically often form a silent partnership with a cash-intensive business, and mingle dirty money with legitimate profits, according to Kenneth Rijock, a financial crime consultant for London-based consultancy World Check and a convicted money launderer.

Launderers are further shielded by the fact that many businesses-including restaurants, laundry mats and grocers-are exempt from currency transaction reporting requirements if they’ve maintained a bank account for at least a year and frequently transact more than $10,000, including for purposes of payroll.

Compliance departments should also determine if a cash-intensive business is located in one [sic] the seven High Intensity Financial Crimes Areas or 25 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas identified by U.S. agencies, said Kahler. The high crime areas include South Florida, New York, New Jersey and Texas counties bordering Mexico, among other regions.

The temptation for small, cash-intensive businesses to aid money launderers increases during economic downturns, said Rijock. A sudden upswing in profits by 50 percent or more in one month from a laundry mat, auto dealer, jeweler or restaurant, for example, may indicate comingling of criminal proceeds with business earnings, he said.

Regardless of the checks, at some point, compliance officers should expect push back from account managers hoping to net lucrative accounts, said Rijock. “Account management versus compliance is as old as the hills, and nine times out of 10 the need for additional revenue streams trumps compliance concerns,” he said.

But when account managers win out with bank management, compliance officers shouldn’t simply give up on imposing anti-money laundering checks on the risky accounts, according to Kahler.

“If compliance has to budge, they should push for site visits and extra monitoring from an initial site visit to five or six site visits per year, all of which entail extra labor costs,” said Kahler.

Moreover, compliance officers can further clarify the financial picture by comparing any accounts that their financial institution maintains for a competitor of the client, said Quintana. Should the bank not maintain accounts of competitors, compliance staff might visit other competitors in “drive by” reviews that allow them to compare business volume, advertizing and marquees.

A nondescript business boasting returns significantly higher than a competitor with heavy foot traffic and seemingly more effective advertising could indicate money laundering, said Quintana.

 

NOTE: This was published about the same time as I published my last blog post. The article is from a publication of the International Association for Asset Recovery, of which I am a member.

Later this year, I will begin a short series on electronic eavesdropping. Hope you will tune in!

 

What a tangled web we weave       

         When once we practice to deceive.         

Now watch how complex these transactions can become. You already know that business expenses are tax deductible. These expenses can be overstated to cover illicit cash being injected into the business for laundering. But there is a catch. Inflated expenses are likely to attract the attention of the Internal Revenue Service.       

                The Service has a solid understanding of the range of expenses involved with running every business that has ever been reported in the United States. An occasional anomaly may remain unchallenged. But tax returns that each year state expenses the Service considers out of proportion will result in a routine audit. The IRS auditor would not mention tax fraud, or any other suspicion. The Service would merely want the taxpayer to justify the business expenses that seemed unrealistic during the initial review of the business tax return.         

          Here is a practical example. Let’s say Pitorri and Associates, LLC  files a return for a start-up business, claiming startup expenses of $75,000. Now that would result (or at least, should result) in a request by IRS to support those expenses with receipts. Why? Because the firm is not inventorying anything, not buying lots of office furniture, not renting high-cost office space, and not hiring two or three people. So why is a small, professional firm spending 75 k   just to get started? Another example, still using my own firm to segue into the meat of this article.         

           Let’s say, down the road, we start claiming expenses of 60 – 70 k  per year. In reality, perhaps, we are grossing only 50 k  per year. The IRS is kind of quirky on this:  we cannot deduct 70 thousand dollars of expenses from 50 thousand dollars of revenue!*  But we need (in this made-up scenario) to dispose of, let’s say, 60 thousand dollars in dirty money, plus 10 in real expenses. And by the way, we must do it in such manner that if a skilled asset searcher inquired into our business, she would not see the laundry operation.         

 Inflatables         

 Okay, to justify inflated expenses, the criminal must overstate his sales volume or revenue to explain the extra cash that is supposed to be available to pay those expenses. (“Extra” because the routine or actual  business cash flow will not support the amounts of cash that would have to be available to pay the inflated expenses).         

          As you saw in the first part of this series, the physical payment of cash to vendors or suppliers can present a problem. Unless…  unless those vendors and suppliers are in cahoots with (the proper term is in a conspiracy to commit [a specific crime]) the business person. How many businesses have thousands of dollars lying on premises for cash payments? It fact, it is rare that any business pays cash at all for any procurement items, except those which qualify for petty cash withdrawals. Hence, cash disbursements per se invite attention and suspicion.         

         Further, the criminal would have to deposit the illicit funds without any business transaction to explain them. These funds would become the overstated revenues. But they would also be taxable. Now, I ask you: Why steal money, only to have it taxed?         

         Here’s a loophole. Most mom and pop shops get periodic support from mom and pop as well as cousins, aunts, rich uncles, and other “family”. The business owner can then deposit any amount of money into the business account, and post the books with the perfectly appropriate entry “Loans from stockholders”. The cash received in this manner is not taxable to the business. This is a perfectly legitimate transaction that many of us small business peole use to keep our enterprises afloat in lean times. But there are still some threads dangling loose from this web of deceit.         

Sinkables         

If you  have been following me the whole way, you might ask, “Okay, but then how does the criminal account for the cash that he used to float the business?” He probably does not. That cash itself is probably in dire need of being laundered. This could become real tricky for the co-conspirators; mistakes here could sink the enterprise. (Remember the Anchovy Caper in the previous posting?) Here’s what I mean. Loans From Stockholders, while not subject to tax, do not account for inflated expenses or overstated revenue. And if they occur in large amounts, with regularity, the IRS may consider them to be unearned income, taxable as ordinary revenue.         

          On the other hand, if the criminal handles the Loans From Stockholders account skillfully, the account can become a serious moneymaker. Loans routinely carry an interest schedule. All interest paid by a business constitutes a business operating expense which can be deducted from the gross revenues. The debtor business can structure the loan, the interest, and the repayment schedule in such manner that as the loan amortizes over several years, the interest payments offset a significant percentage of the revenue, inflated or real.         

          Oh, by the way, about those interest payments. In reality, they don’t exist.         

Next time:  Secrets of a successful criminal.       

* Properly documented, in accordance with IRS rules, this would constitute a business loss. But the business could not just continue in this manner, year after year. You can be sure that this would invite either auditing by mail, or a full desk-side audit. Remember, the whole idea of money laundering is that it be able to continue uninterruptedly, year after year.