Hacker News Reader

The trigger for surveillance is $600 which is practically every American. It is certainly about regular people.

Larger sums of many are already tracked, so wealthy people would have already been monitored.

The current limit is $10,000 (but practically less in an attempt to nail those who engage in "structuring" transactions to avoid the $10k limit). That's a car or any other number of things in reach of normal not-considered-wealthy people. [0] is interesting reading, but honestly just searching for "structuring" leads to several cases like [1] where the government seized $107,000 from a convenience store owner due to the deposits from that business being under the reporting threshold.

I don't know how you get under a $600 threshold, but exposing orders of magnitude more people to this policy is likely to do far more damage than to result in any good. This is already not just about wealthy people.

[0] https://www.overlawyered.com/2012/04/structuring-who-can-get...

[1] https://reason.com/2015/05/01/irs-steals-107000-from-conveni...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com