[Marianne]

In July 2001 the bank paid a $10 million fine because of the Limbaugh transactions and many others like it.
If you withdraw more than $10,000 of your own money, the bank has to report it to the federal government.
If you withdraw less than $10,000 of your own money, the bank has to report it to the federal government.

Catch 22?

[gridlock]

Well, it looks like US Trust had a procedure that was designed to get around reporting requirements. They arranged to dispense cash in just-less-that-$10,000 increments and then supplied couriers so the customer was not inconvenienced. The purpose of the $10,000 reporting requirement is to prevent money laundering. It is the banks responsibility to report if people are arranging their transactions in such a way as to avoid the reporting requirement.

In this case, the bank itself was circumventing the requirement. That's why the bank gets whalloped (appropriately, IMA) with a $10,000,000 fine. It's not like they failed in their responsiblity to monitor transactions. US Trust set up the mechanism that people used to thwart the law.

Now you might not like this particular law. I, myself, find it an unacceptable intrusion into the right to be left alone. But the law is pretty clear, and US Trust broke it.

Now as for Rush, he is not being prosecuted on that basis. He did not break the law with his pattern of withdrawls. What Blum is suggesting might be the basis for prosecution is the fact that Rush then turned this money over to his supplier, but did not ensure that the supplier was reporting the income and paying the tax. The position of the government, if the prosecution were to proceed on this basis, would be that Limbaughs large cash transactions were in fact designed to be untraceable, and thus assisted the supplier in breaking the law.

This is probably true, and probably against the law. But it seems that it would be an extremely agressive use of prosecutorial discretion to go after Limbaugh for that.