I’m in the paper with an opinion piece on federal prosecutors’ assault on small business for bank deposit “structuring.” My posts on the South Mountain Creamery case, in which federal authorities seized the bank account of a Middletown, Maryland dairy which had allegedly been depositing farmers’ market proceeds in installments of less than $10,000, are here and here. Van Smith of the Baltimore City Paper deserves particular credit for breaking the structuring story with reports here and here. Update: South Mountain case settles.
Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
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Structuring laws are for the “little people.”
It’s unfortunate, and the punishment is usually disproportionate, but actually these rules do serve a purpose. Money laundering is a huge problem, and if we want to fight against organized crime, rules to make it more difficult for them to make dirty money clean have to exist.
JM, that’s true, but it seems that there needs to be more than a “collateral damage, acceptable losses, break a few eggs” approach to the enforcement. It wasn’t just outright extortion that the Framers had in mind when they wrote the Fourth Amendment.
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