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There are myriad more effective ways to reduce tax fraud and increase tax revenue. Something else is behind thism proposed new invasion of privacy. The right to privacy is a fundamental human right in any democratic country. It is also recognized by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and many other international and regional treaties. Beyond the laws and proclamations, the right to privacy is rooted in a citizen’s inherent right to dignity. In a democracy, the state is subordinate to the citizen hence the government must respect the rights and dignity...

Democrats may soon cut the price tag of their latest spending bill somewhere below $3.5 trillion, but they are still desperate to get you to pay for some of it. That is why they are trying to raise $460 billion by taking your banking data. Buried deep in the Democrats' current $3.5 trillion spending bill is a section requiring all banks to provide data to the Internal Revenue Service on every account that had annual deposits or withdrawals worth more than $600.

Financial experts are pushing back against the Biden administration's proposal to include a provision in the $3.5 trillion spending bill to extend the IRS' reach to have bank transactions over $600 reported. The Democrats’ goal is to garner $463 billion in additional personal income tax over the next decade....However, experts say giving such power to a regulatory body of the U.S. government is an overreach that could infringe on privacy and place undue regulatory and compliance burdens and costs on banks and other financial institutions. Plus, taking snapshots of the massive amount of transactional data in the U.S. banking system...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen defended on Tuesday the new requirement that all purchases above $600 be reported to the IRS Said it will help fill the $7 trillion tax gap 'from places where the information on income is opaque and can be hidden' Also said Biden's controversial pick to lead the agency responsible for regulating America's banks deserves a 'fair hearing' 'Professor [Saule] Omarova is the President's nominee... And I think she deserves a fair hearing by the Senate. I hope she will get that' Omarova is a Cornell Law School professor who graduated from college in Moscow, where she...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is defending a Biden administration proposal that would require banks to report data to the Internal Revenue Service on transactions over $600, calling the collection of information “routine,” after taking heat for the idea that is widely seen as an unprecedented invasion of privacy. During an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday, Yellen was pressed on whether the IRS has the “wherewithal” to collect more information about taxpayers and bank accounts including cash flows, something many Republicans have called invasive. “Well, of course they do,” Yellen said. “Right now, on every bank account that earns...

Wyoming Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis tore into Treasury Sec. Janet Yellen on Tuesday for her support of a Biden proposal to require banks to hand over transaction data over $600 on individual bank accounts. 'Banks do not work for the IRS,' Lummis said. 'This is invasive of privacy. Wyoming's people literally will find alternatives to traditional banks just to thwart IRS access to their personal information, not because they're trying to hide anything, but because they are not willing to share everything.' The senator asked Yellen if she was 'aware how unnecessary this regulatory burden is?' 'Do you distrust the...

Simply put, the American Families Plan calls for banks and other financial institutions to report more than just a taxpayer’s interest earned, capital gains and losses. Banks and other financial institutions would also be required to report “aggregate account outflows and inflows.” In other words, the IRS will know about all of your bank accounts, whether you earned income on that account or not, how much is in the account in a given year, and how much was transferred in and out of the account.

In order to make sure the rich are paying their fair share in taxes, President Joe Biden says the IRS just needs two bits of information: all the money that goes into your bank account, and all the money that comes out. That's how Biden pitched his plan for a more comprehensive financial surveillance state—all to catch those nasty tax-cheating rich folks, of course—during a speech from the White House on Thursday afternoon. The plan "will give the IRS the resources it needs to keep up with the lawyers and accountants of the super-wealthy. It would ask just for two...

Some Americans are furious with part of the $3.5 trillion spending plan from Joe Biden and the Democrats that would allow the IRS to monitor bank transactions.The administration claims the monitoring would prevent tax evasion and target audits, but some are concerned that it would violate the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, The Daily Mail reported.The proposal would require banks to report to gross inflows and outflows to the IRS, including transactions from Venmo, PayPal, crypto exchanges and the like in an effort to fight tax evasion. The IRS would know how much money is in an individual’s bank account...

ZURICH (Reuters) - The era of mystery-cloaked numbered Swiss bank accounts has officially come to a close as Switzerland, the world’s biggest center for managing offshore wealth, began automatically sharing client data with tax authorities in dozens of other countries. The Federal Tax Administration (FTA) said on Friday it had for the first time exchanged financial account data at the end of September under global standards that aim to crack down on tax cheats. Bank secrecy still exists in some areas — Swiss authorities cannot automatically see what citizens have in their domestic bank accounts, for example — but gone...

The United States is intensifying its pressure on the Palestinian Authority (PA). The Al-Jazeera network reported on Sunday evening that the US administration has decided to immediately close all bank accounts linked to the PA or the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in banks across the United States. The US is not confirming the report at the moment, but the State Department hinted last week after the closure of the PLO’s mission in Washington that there would be further steps against the Palestinian Arabs. Earlier on Sunday, the Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen television reported that the US ordered the PLO envoy to the...

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The RT broadcaster's accounts have been blocked in the United Kingdom, Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said Monday, suggesting that the move stifles free speech. "Our accounts in the UK have been closed. All Accounts. 'The decision is not subject to revision'. Long live freedom of speech!" Simonyan said in a Twitter post.

“Negative interest rates” have become a phenomenon with economists and the media. But I’m writing to tell you something about negative interest rates you haven’t heard. You certainly won’t hear about it in the mainstream press. What’s coming at you is a historic event. It’s something our grandchildren will hear stories about, much like the Great Depression or the Cold War. It could send the price of gold much higher in the coming years. If you know what’s coming, it could mean the difference between having lots of free cash in retirement and barely getting by. And please remember this...

Skittish banks have been closing what they consider high-risk accounts, many of them held by money transfer firms and humanitarian organizations, prompting the U.S. Government Accountability Office to open an investigation, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. This week, the Journal detailed how such organizations have been forced out of the global banking system. More than 50 nonprofits sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Secretary of State John Kerry accusing banks and the Treasury of playing the blame game and doing little to solve the problem. They want the U.S. Treasury to state nonprofits aren’t inherently high-risk....

Bruce Francis transferred some money to his dog walker to pay for services to his pit bull, and wrote the dog's name, "Dash," in the notes field. The processors at Chase Bank thought that Dash might be a sneaky way of spelling Daesh (which is the mocking, insulting nickname used by critics to refer to "ISIS"), decided that this was possible terrorist money-laundering, and stopped the payment, froze his account, and notified the Treasury Department that he was a suspected terrorist. It's hard to know what's stupidest about this: that the bank thought that Daesh was the kind of thing...

Britain's leading anti-Israel organization has had its bank accounts closed, after it was revealed it may have been "inadvertently" funding Palestinian terrorism. The radical Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) - which counts UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as one of its patrons - was informed by the Co-operative Bank that its accounts were being closed due to the "high risk" destinations of its funds, many of which are donated to Hamas-linked agencies and other extremist groups in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. ...

Do you remember what happened when Cyprus decided to defy the EU? In the end, the entire banking system of the nation collapsed and money was confiscated from private bank accounts. Well, the nation of Greece is now approaching a similar endgame. At this point, the Greek government has not received any money from the EU or the IMF since August 2014. As you can imagine, that means that Greek government accounts are just about bone dry. The new Greek government continues to insist that it will never “violate its anti-austerity mandate”, but the screws are tightening. Right now the...

Thieves are stealing money from people's credit cards, bank and PayPal accounts -- by first tapping into their Starbucks mobile app. Starbucks (SBUX) on Wednesday acknowledged that criminals have been breaking into individual customer rewards accounts. The Starbucks app lets you pay at checkout with your phone. It can also reload Starbucks gift cards by automatically drawing funds from your bank account, credit card or PayPal. That's how criminals are siphoning money away from victims. They break into a victim's Starbucks account online, add a new gift card, transfer funds over -- and repeat the process every time the original...

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has crafted a new policy that would allow government officials to seize bank accounts involved in financial structuring schemes prior to filing criminal charges against the individuals who own those accounts. The new policy stems from the Justice Department’s ongoing review of its asset forfeiture program. The policy is aimed at preventing criminals from making a series of currency transactions under a certain monetary threshold in order to evade reporting the transaction to the authorities, according to a department statement. Those types of transactions typically lead to “the most serious illegal banking transactions” and occur...

The Federal Government looks set to introduce a tax on bank deposits in the May budget. The idea of a bank deposit tax was raised by Labor in 2013 and was criticised by Tony Abbott at the time. Assistant Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has indicated an announcement on the new tax could be made before the budget. The Government is heading for a fight with the banking industry, which has warned it will have to pass the cost back onto customers. Mr Frydenberg is a member of the Government's Expenditure Review Committee but has refused to provide any details.