Many people are working on their taxes now. One of the items that increases your taxes is interest income. Each bank sends you a form reporting the amount of interest you earned at that bank, and they send that information along to the IRS so you can pay taxes on that income. If you don't want to pay those taxes, just go bank with Citibank -- they won't report your income to the IRS.

How is that possible? Well, the way your taxes are reported is with your social security number. Citibank now says they will issue bank accounts and even credit cards to people who do not have social security numbers (primarily illegal criminal immigrants). Well, why should they be the only people to benefit from Citibank's niceness? I think I should be able to open an account at Citibank and not provide my social security number. Then they have no way to report my earnings because they don't know who I am.

Is that breaking the law? Well, you'd have to ask Citibank about that. And feel free to ask them, when you're opening the account, how they meet the federal Patriot Act requirements for identifying the account holder. And not just illegal criminal aliens can benefit -- if you're a terrorist and want to earn some free interest on your laundered money, feel free to apply to Citibank because they won't ask you for your taxpayer ID and can't report your earnings.

I wonder if anyone cares. Clearly the federal government doesn't, or Citibank would be stopped from doing this.

Posted by: Ogre at 03:04 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 269 words, total size 2 kb.