A former ATF agent has now pleaded guilty to structuring money in a manner designed to avoid a bank’s reporting requirements.
52-year-old Paul A. White, a former federal agent with the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Bureau in Omaha, Nebraska has now pled guilty to a violation of Title 31, United States Code 524(a)(3) and 5324(d), which is better known as the structuring of financial transactions to evade the bank reporting requirements.
This case is being prosecuted by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa, and that is based on the recusal of the District of Nebraska United States Attorney’s Office,
The court documents describe how White deposited a total of $99,900 in two different banks and structured the deposits so that he could evade the requirement that the bank is legally obligated to report transactions in excess of $10,000.
White is scheduled to be sentenced soon in this crime, and he could face a maximum penalty of five years in prison. A federal district court judge is going to determine the sentence after they consider all of the United States Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory requirements.
Acting U.S. Attorney Richard D.Westphal of the Southern District of Iowa also made the announcement while the office of the Inspector General investigated this case.
Structuring is a strategy that has been used by businesses in an effort for them to evade taxes and hide large amounts of cash. With a structuring strategy, these companies will often deposit smaller amounts of cash to avoid the automatic reporting requirements that banks have to make to the government.
Simply put, if you make a deposit to a bank of over $10,000, they are required to make a “Cash Transaction Report” or “CTR” on these funds. Moreover, even if you think you can be clever and just deposit the full $10,000 over a five-day period, the bank can still perform something called a “suspicious activity report”, otherwise known as a SAR.
In the case of this former ATF agent, and many others, the fact remains that they found out the hard way that these banks take such suspicious monetary activities very seriously.