Biden’s financial surveillance plan is essentially a PATRIOT Act for the IRS

One of the lessons learned by the tyrants running our government since 9/11 is how easy its been to expand their power to spy on our daily lives via Orwellian programs like the PATRIOT Act, and with Joe Biden’s new financial surveillance plan about to be launched, we are about to enter an age where government will track every aspect of our financial lives with what is essentially a PATRIOT Act for the IRS.

The connection between the original PATRIOT Act and Biden’s financial surveillance plan is clear to see.

A little known and often overlooked provision in the PATRIOT Act changed the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act, a change that established new standards for banks to identify customers, maintain records, requiring them to report cash transactions over $10,000. Allegedly, this change would prevent the funding of terrorist activities, instead it resulted in the violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.

Giving government the power to spy on bank accounts is a serious threat to our personal privacy.

In a November 2020 article, I covered a Federal Reserve and Treasury Department plan to expand government’s power to spy on the international financial transactions of everyday Americans by essentially “deputizing” banks to act on behalf of the government and gather private information on people without due process.

These surveilled people are suspected of no crime, nor are they given any opportunity to opt out of this data collection. Still, the government preemptively requires that their transactions be tagged and tracked as if they had done something wrong.

Under the original PATRIOT Act, government’s power to spy on our financial transactions has been “limited,” but Joe Biden’s PATRIOT Act for the IRS will expand that power to allow Big Brother to spy on every one of your non-cash financial transactions (via Reason.com):

Imagine living in a world where every one of your noncash financial transactions—a restaurant meal, a Venmo transfer to a friend, maybe some bitcoin bought on the dips—was automatically reported to a beefed-up, audit-hungry IRS.

That dystopia will become a reality if President Joe Biden gets his way. Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and key Capitol Hill allies such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) are pushing a vast, intrusive financial surveillance system in the name of closing the “tax gap.”

The administration’s proposed “comprehensive financial account reporting regime” would dramatically increase the types of financial institutions and transactions exposed to the feds’ prying eyes. “All business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts,” would be forced to “report gross inflows and outflows” to the IRS. And not just bank accounts: The dragnet would now include PayPal, settlement companies, and “crypto asset exchanges,” for starters.

The new domestic surveillance program, which requires congressional approval, is one prong of a tripartite strategy for transforming the entire global financial system into a harmonious, haven-free collection funnel to the IRS. The second part, which has taken up the bulk of Biden’s multilateral diplomacy thus far, is getting the industrialized world to agree on a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent, while setting up a system to prevent multinational companies from registering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions. (emphasis mine)

Biden claims his plan to give the IRS power to spy on bank accounts will only target the “rich,” but it will ultimately pull in data on nearly every law-abiding, tax-compliant Americans because every bank and financial institution will be required to participate, as Tax Policy Center Senior Fellow Steve Rosenthal pointed out in the Journal:

Although administration officials talk about going after wealthy tax dodgers with their expanded staffing, the bank reporting proposal wouldn’t do much to them, he said. That is because the highest-earning Americans are employing more sophisticated tax-dodging techniques than just declining to declare all their income.

The bank-reporting rules are designed to get a different group of people altogether—business owners who inflate their deductions and don’t report all their income.

“This is a political call by the Biden administration: Let’s not tell those guys, small-business guys, what we’re doing,” Mr. Rosenthal said.

The Biden administration calls this equal-opportunity spying equity. (emphasis mine)

From our computers and cell phones to our bank accounts, nothing has been off limits when it comes to Washington’s unquenchable thirst for more power over our daily lives — a situation made even by worse in the Age of COVID tyranny. The liberty-killing laws and policies created post-9/11 continue to create new ways to for government to expand its control over our lives and advance its tyrannical agenda.

The Joe Biden’s liberty-killing PATRIOT Act for the IRS gives government more control over our lives daily lives and should serve as a reminder of the lengths politicians in both parties are willing to go to manipulate and pervert seemingly clear legal standards and rules for the benefit of the state and its agenda . . . Constitution be damned!

This is why we need to fight and take back the liberty we’ve lost so that America can return to the principles of our founding: limited government, fiscal, social, and constitutional conservatism, family values, traditional marriage, and Judeo-Christian values.

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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