this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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I wasn't talking about war on drugs, those should be decriminalized anyway.
What I keep seeing in my personal life is car repair shops, medical professionals and other businesses that usually charge a lot and then take cash only. It's obvious why.
Tax evasion is a thing, yes. But it's also relatively easy to prosecute by auditing.
Money laundering requires a source of illegal money. And, what you may not realize, money laundering schemes always pay tax. They actually overpay taxes by faking non-existent economic activity in order to make the illegal money legal.
Take away the source of illegal money and money laundering disappears.
How are you going to audit cashless businesses that invoice one price and take another and how much is that going to cost? We're talking about likely widespread issue that needs solving systemically, not with adhoc actions.
Dude, tax collection has been optimized for hundreds of years before we even had electronic money.
They even got Al Capone.
Money laundering is the opposite of tax evasion. If you don't understand that those two things are not the same, then I can't really help you.
All of you guys focus on some billionaires, mafia bosses etc but we're talking about 3k/10k EUR limits.
I'm asking how do you audit cash-heavy businesses doing petty tax fraud cost effectively?
You weren't asking anything. You were just lumping things together.
To audit tax fraud, just audit the books. If a restaurant is full on a Friday night, but the books show few sales, then you have your evidence.
If someone buys a new car and has a nice house, but claims their business is hardly making profit, then the tax authority can demand they explain the source of their income.
Again, this is how they got Al Capone 100 years ago.
Money laundering is much more difficult and it's the opposite. Because the laundering restaurant can just write in the books that they sold 100 more cocktails on a Friday night, paid by cash. And they also pay the required tax on it.
To combat money laundering, you need to audit the customers of the establishment, which is why they want to reduce the usage of cash.
But instead of turning the EU into East Germany, we should just stop criminalizing vices and regulate that, which is the main source of dirty money.
Seems like your solution costs more than it brings to the budget and all that you're gaining is false sense of privacy.
I am not proposing any new solution. Tax collection agencies across the European Union already audit businesses and it's a revenue generating activity.
So you're fine with tax collection being ineffective, got it. All taxation is theft and so on, right?
Dude, I have talked to AI bots that are more intelligent than this
Tax collection is very effective. Extremely effective, even.
That's my whole point.