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Comment by orangegreen | Hacker News Reader

How does one launder money / evade taxes with high end art?

My naive understanding is it’s a way of transferring money in return for something supposedly valuable. That might really be payment for something else.

Then why would they do it so visibly when they could use quiet assets? IMO that doesnt make sense

1. Buy for $x

2. Get appraised for $100x

3. Donate

4. Take $100x tax deduction

Doesn’t the tax deduction only apply for 30% of the donation though?

100x * .30 = 3x value in deductions. You can scale the 100x accordingly to your needs.

That doesn't work. That's the great myth of donation tax dodging that isn't actually true, yet is endlessly repeated. You ultimately - at best - only save a fraction of your donated value, you'd be better off just selling the asset instead of donating it for a fractional tax saving.

If that actually worked the top 10% wouldn't be carrying such an outsized share of the nation's tax burden on its shoulders via our very progressive tax system, they'd all be busy dodging all of their taxes via donations.

If you really wanted to avoid taxes, you wouldn't donate anything, you wouldn't sell anything.

The single best way to avoid taxes in your lifetime, is to borrow against your assets and only repay the borrowing in death. Your cost will be interest (interest rates are ridiculously low today). You could go much of your lifetime without paying taxes, while enjoying the good life borrowing against eg your stock holdings. Warren Buffett has made this point numerous times, that if he wanted to avoid paying taxes during his lifetime while enjoying his immense wealth, he'd just use that approach. Buffett could have taken out a $1 billion loan 30 years ago, had fun with that cash, and paid zero taxes on it for decades (while also not selling his primary asset - Berkshire Hathaway stock - which has appreciated dramatically).

> you'd be better off just selling the asset instead of donating it for a fractional tax saving.

The idea of this scheme (which may be exaggerated on the internet) is that you cannot sell the asset.

This is a painting by the cousin of someone who went to the same barbershop as de Kooning. There is zero market. There are approximately zero buyers. There is some story to be constructed that plausibly justifies some "historical value." There is presumably some decorative value.

A fraction of the donated value is still much bigger than the actual value you paid for the art. The important part is to get an appraisal far above the actual value.

How does one get an appraisal that the IRS will believe?

The IRS is way understaffed. I imagine they aren't looking too hard.

If you are reporting hundreds of k in donations I'm almost certain you are getting audited, even if it takes them a few years to begin it

I keep seeing this discussed, but I have honestly had difficulty getting relatively large loans against assets. All they seemed to care about was income. Yes, Buffet definitely has a better relationship with the bank than I, but I wonder if this is really possible to copy by the average person.

Isn't it a scheme where you sell to yourself and then claim illegal money is money you earned from the sale ?

This is the exact question ("how?") I always ask when someone parrots "tax evasion" and the answers I get back never make any sense, at all.

And it's always from a bunch of armchair "tax dodgers" that, judging from the fantasies they share, have never seen an IRS form in their lives.

Your assumption is it's only US tax evasion. It's also about getting money out of other countries and evading their taxes, creating values of wealth store. Much like the real estate industry in key markets of the US, foreign investors don't care about paying more if it means they can safely get their cash out of host countries.

1031 Exchanges are one method, buying overpriced items to bring illicit cash into legitimate ownership is another. There are a myriad of ways to make it beneficial. I think we all can agree though that the price is nuts.

Then again The H.Biden paintings are listed for 75 - 500,000 so maybe I just have 0 clue about what super wealthy people want.

>buying overpriced items to bring illicit cash into legitimate ownership is another

No, Christie's (or some other big auction house) is never going to take your money that way. No one, actually.

It's the same with real estate. "Just walk in with a million in $20 bills and pay the property with cash". That's not going to happen. Ever.

I believe it's more like: here's 1.5 million dollars that you can use to explain to the IRS how you're paying for a new house. If you give me 2 million in illicit cash, I can use that elsewhere and the IRS doesn't care because I already have 100 million dollars in assets.

>IRS doesn't care because I already have 100 million dollars in assets

Again, that won't happen, ever. The IRS is not going to just forget those 2 million, they don't care if it's "pocket change" for you or not.

Also, you are implying that somebody with 100M+ in assets is going to compromise everything to launder 2 million from some other stranger ...

Never ever?

You’d think so, and yet it’s come to light Crown Casino in Melbourne was doing just that, knowingly maintaining relationships with known crime organisations, and was actively enabling money laundering.[1]

I argue politics and big business is a front for bad behaviour, as evidenced by the endless stream of corruption news pouring out of the Australian federal government.

I find it difficult to believe the the other G20 nations[2] are markedly better.

1. https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/five-bombshells-th...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G20

That's a casino, you expect cash to be there. And they're being busted ... so there goes your super laundering operation.

You will never buy property and pay for it in cash (in developed countries, obviously).

You’d think so, but I actually know a drug dealer who did just that not so long ago.

Cash deposits above $10,000 in Australia are mandatorily reported, that doesn’t mean every cash deposit above $10,000 is investigated.

Wait, so your friend (or acquaintance?), bought an apartment in cash? Or does he regularly makes cash deposits below $10k?

Please clarify because those two things are THREE orders of magnitude apart.

Buying an apartment with a briefcase full of money is something you see only on Disney movies.

Small businesses regularly make $20-30k deposits in cash. That represents the weekly cash revenue of a successful McDonald's franchise. You can slip an extra $1-5k in there, weekly - If you do your accounting "right", it looks like you're moving a little more product than you actually are, and is virtually indistinguishable from real business. See Walter White buying a Car Wash in Breaking Bad. You need a bit of scale: 5 or 10 locations to make it really work, but it does work.

I know, but that's still far from making a $1M+-or-so operation with a bunch of cash.

That's the whole point, you just can't drop that much gray money on something at once.

Purchase a property with AU$150,000 in cash, literally a briefcase full of cash.

So, he’d have handed that money to the vendor.

Wow, amazing. I stand corrected then, but I don't think you could pull that off on this side of the world.

I think you drastically under estimate how much dodgy shit goes on all around us all the time.

There is but a thin veneer of righteousness barely covering a small fraction of the lands.

There is a place you can do this. Casinos.

There's apparently been an incredible amount of money laundering going through casinos in Vancouver.

The smart way to launder money is to create a company that "rates and pays" stuff like your electric bill then vastly overcharges you to do it.

What if the buyer is from outside US - say a foreign oligarch or dictator? I find it hard they refuse to sell to such people altogether, esp. seeing how much real estate in London is being bought by Russian kleptocrats.

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