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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

>Do you have any actual example of that ? What transaction do small farmers need to do along roadside for thousands of eur ? As kid of small farmer I don't remember anything like that ever happening.

While each transaction might be <3000, on a good weekend, I could see it totaling to be over that amount. At this point, would it be illegal for the farmer to show up to his bank to deposit 3001? Does the farmer now need to waste time to make 2 separate trips to make each deposit < 3000? Maybe take the spouse and kids along so they each make a smaller deposit? Does this require visiting multiple branches?

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A cash deposit into a bank isn't a payment.

That's a very strange question. Obviously businesses are still allowed to deposit more than 3000€ to their bank accounts.

How would supermarket function otherwise?

The farmer isn't an individual, it's a business as well.

Doesn’t this only apply to individual transactions?

Only it’s very weird to just assume that this might apply to bank deposits…

>Only it’s very weird to just assume that this might apply to bank deposits…

Is it? I find it weird you think so. If you and I exchange > 3000 between us, nobody will ever know, so the law is pointless. The one place that this can be policed is at the bank level. You're assumption seems to be that if you gave me 3000, I'd just keep it in cash.

In the US, if you make a deposit > $10,000, the bank is regulated to report it. It doesn't matter why you are making that deposit, it gets reported. Applying the same thing to Euro markets only seems natural.

Edit: Actually, even car dealerships have to report someone showing up to buy a car with >$10,000 in cash as well.

> Is it? I find it weird you think so.

We might focus on the law itself and not some hypothetical situation.

> nobody will ever know, so the law is pointless.

You can’t sign a contract for anything worth more than €3000 if you want to pay in cash. If you want to declare your income, pay taxes, prove that you obtained the money legally when you later want to deposit it to an bank, during a tax audit etc. Of course it won’t affect transactions which are already done illegally so it depends on what do you mean by ‘pointless’.

The $10k limit is also a thing in Europe, the exact amount varies by state though (I think).

You can deposit whatever amount you want into your bank account, they just might ask questions regarding where the money came from, and if you show that you sold products there's zero issues.

> show that you sold products there's zero issues

well, there might be one small issue!

how can you 'show you sold products'? after all, you sold them!!

isn't the cash sufficient to show you sold products? hasn't it been sufficient for thousands of years?

This isn't the gotcha you think it is. As for all businesses transactions, you should file it in your accounting software and make sure you pay taxes, vat etc on it. This law changes nothing in that regard.

So now you're bringing in your accounting software and tax records to the bank to make the deposit?

Every single country in the EU has VAT. If you’re yearly revenue is to low (not that likely for commercial farmers) you still have to give out receipts for every sale.

Also have you heard about bookeping? It’s also a thing that has existed for thousands of years.

So a farmer is giving out receipts; how does that help the farmer at the bank?

To sum up, what is the standard of records that the bank will accept? Is there one?

does the bank say, "we see you wrote that you sold 20 boxes of produce on Saturday"

Presumably you have to pay taxes so the standard is probably somewhere in between what the tax authorities acquire and no questions asked.

Buy yeah, some banks in the EU might be overzealous and small/medium businesses can often run into issues related to their idiotic fraud prevention systems. But I don’t see how is that an issue with the system itself and not with the implementation.

> Does the farmer now need to waste time to make 2 separate trips to make each deposit < 3000?

In the US, that's called structuring and will result in some very uncomfortable conversations.

Do you not see difference between paying for service and depositing account ?

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