Category Archives: IRS White House Collusion

Paid Cash for Real Estate or via LLC, Read on…

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Note, there are other cities where real estate money laundering occurs with frequency. They include San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Las Vegas, Chicago and Atlanta.

There are guidelines for real estate professionals, click here.

Money laundering also occurs in commercial real estate, click here.

The official 21 page document on real estate money laundering is here.

Click here to see an actual case that involved a Russian.

U.S. targets money laundering in all-cash home sales in Miami, Manhattan

Reuters: The United States is hunting down international criminals who launder money through real estate deals, with the Treasury Department ordering title insurance companies to report the identities of people paying cash for high-end properties in Miami and Manhattan.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, an arm of the U.S. Treasury, said on Wednesday it is concerned that individuals buy residential real estate in cash through shell companies to hide their assets and veil their identities.

“We are seeking to understand the risk that corrupt foreign officials, or transnational criminals, may be using premium U.S. real estate to secretly invest millions in dirty money,” FinCEN Director Jennifer Shasky Calvery said in a statement.

FinCEN has issued rules aimed at preventing laundering through the mortgage market, but “cash purchases present a more complex gap that we seek to address,” Calvery added.

Title insurers will have to disclose buyer identities in deals of at least $1 million in Miami and at least $3 million for Manhattan, the Miami Herald reported. FinCEN did not answer Reuters’ requests for details.

Research conducted by the Homeland Security officials suggests that the majority of real estate purchases of at least $1 million in Florida’s Miami-Dade and Broward counties are made through shell companies, said John Tobon, deputy special agent in charge at Homeland Security Investigations in Miami.

Money trails linked to drug trafficking, foreign corruption and other criminal activity often lead to luxury real estate properties, but when agents try to determine the true, or “beneficial” owners, they find only documents listing shell companies, many of which in turn are owned by other shell companies, Tobon said.

“It is a part of every single significant investigation that we have ongoing right now,” he added.

But the threshold for reporting cash purchases is so low in the two markets that it will include many mainstream buyers, said Terrence Oved, lawyer with Manhattan real estate and commercial litigation firm Oved & Oved LLP.

“You’re going to get a lot of small fish caught up in this net,” he said.

The temporary orders begin on March 1 and last 180 days, and Oved expects a surge in deals to be completed March. Buyers may turn to other major metropolitan markets such as Los Angeles, as well, he added.

In November 2015, the most recent month for which data is available, 17 percent of the 82,595 all-cash purchases of single family homes and condos went to buyers with an “LLC” in the name, according to the housing data company RealtyTrac, indicating they were purchased by companies. Altogether, a third of home purchases in the United States since 2011 were all-cash.

Meanwhile, there were about $104 billion in transactions involving foreign investors in the U.S. real estate market between April 2014 and March 2015. More than half the buyers in those deals were from China, Canada, India, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, and the majority of transactions involving overseas buyers were in cash, said Deborah Friedman, who works in the FBI’s money laundering intelligence unit, in September.

Those purchases were concentrated in Florida, Texas, Arizona and California, she said.

The Patriot Act of 2001 required the Treasury to either issue rules on anti-money laundering controls and reporting of suspicious activity by real estate professionals or grant an exemption. The exemption has been in place now for more than a decade.

Oh, It was the Kuwaiti that Bought THAT House

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Al-Sabahs’ parties are so popular is that they are lavish. The ruling Al-Sabah family is extremely wealthy, thanks to Kuwait’s oil reserves, one of the largest in the world. When I called Buffy Cafritz, a longtime D.C. socialite, she read me a menu she’d saved from a recent luncheon at the embassy. “She served asparagus vichyssoise and sea bass and pureed potatoes and a raspberry sorbet,” Cafritz says, adding, “I remember she had a pretty tablecloth.”

Georgetown doyennes like Sally Quinn have been complaining for years that socializing in Washington has become aggressively partisan. But Al-Sabah invites Democrats and Republicans, no matter which party is in power. During the Bush years, she arranged benefits to raise money for malaria and education of Afghan women, a cause that Laura Bush championed. In 2009, in line with the newly elected Obama administration’s focus on the environment, she hosted a benefit to celebrate Earth Day, where she honored Leonardo DiCaprio and Hillary Clinton. “She is very astute,” McBride told me. “She pays attention to the issues that are important to the White House at the time and really tries to support those issues, so she marries the social and substantive perfectly. People who are engaged in these issues at higher levels of government will be there.”

But the big draw is undoubtedly the guest list. Al-Sabah skillfully brings together heavyweights from all arenas—including A-list actors, corporate tycoons, and people from the nonprofit world—which guests say offers huge appeal compared with the dreary wonky affairs that pass for Washington social life.

There is much more to this family but now you can begin to see how life rolls in Washington DC. Just ask John Kerry’s wife….

Kuwaiti Embassy buys one of the most expensive homes in Washington

Will that be paper or plastic?

WaPo: The house that Giant built will soon be in new hands. Fessenden House, the former home of Giant Food heir Samuel Lehrman, was purchased by the Kuwaiti Embassy in a deal closed last month, according to a deed filed with the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue.

There’s no word on whether the 22,000-square-foot manse will become the new home of Kuwaiti Ambassador Salem Al-Sabah and his wife, Rima, the power couple who have dominated the invitation-you-can’t-refuse dinner party circuit since arriving in 2001.

When we contacted the embassy, a representative said staff had “been instructed not to give out any information” about the sale. Reached via phone, Rima Al-Sabah, who counts Teresa Heinz Kerry as a close personal friend, offered “no comment.” But according to the Washington Business Journal, the home sold for $18 million.

Fessenden (so named because it’s the largest/fanciest property on the Upper Northwest street of the same name) was originally listed for $22 million in March. The $18 million price tag makes Fessenden one of the priciest single-family real estate transactions in the District last year. The former Textile Museum building, which also hit the market at $22 million, sold in May for $19 million.

Just five minutes from the embassy’s new Fessenden property, the Sabahs regularly host Washington’s VIPs at the ambassador’s modern residence on Tilden Street in Forest Hills, a tony neighborhood chockablock with grand embassy homes. Folks with last names such as Kerry, Clinton, Biden, Bush, Powell and Pelosi have been known to rub elbows with Catherine Zeta-Jones, Leonardo DiCaprio and Michael Bolton at the Sabah residence. The parties that the ambassador and his wife throw are noticeably lavish, with Mrs. Sabah overseeing nearly every detail, including devising the perfect mix of A-listers and politicos from either side of the aisle.

Universities Hide 100,000 Foreign White-Collar H-1B Employees

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So, exactly which agency has sent a memo to selected universities across the country to hide these numbers? Who issued this edict? Heh….only one guess.

In order to hire an H-1B worker in place of a U.S. citizen or green card holder, the hiring company must show that there is no “minimally qualified” citizen or green card holder to take the job. Recruiting such minimally qualified candidates is generally done through advertising: if nobody responds to the ad then there must not be any minimally qualified candidates. Example: Employers are posting jobs that don’t really exist, seeking candidates they don’t want, and paying for bogus non-ads to show there’s an IT labor shortage in America. Except of course there isn’t an IT labor shortage.

Universities Hide Workforce of 100,000 Extra Foreign White-Collar H-1B Employees

Industry executives and university advocates have successfully duped nearly every reporter, editor and anchor nationwide about the scale and purpose of the H-1B professional outsourcing program.

Breitbart: The journalists–and Americans—have been kept in the dark while universities and many allied name-brand companies have quietly imported an extra workforce of at least 100,000 lower-wage foreign professionals in place of higher-wage American graduates, above the supposed annual cap of 85,000 new H-1Bs.

Less than one-sixth of these extra 100,000 outsourced hires are the so-called “high-tech” computer experts that dominate media coverage of the contentious H-1B private-sector outsourcing debate.

Instead, the universities’ off-the-books H-1B hires include 21,754 professors, lecturers and instructors, 20,566 doctors, clinicians and therapists, 25,175 researchers, post-docs and biologists, plus 30,000 financial planners, p.r. experts, writers, editors, sports coaches, designers, accountants, economists, statisticians, lawyers, architects, computer experts and much else. The universities have zero legal obligation to recruit Americans for these jobs.

These white-collar guest-workers are not immigrants — they are foreign professionals hired at low wages for six years to take outsourced, white-collar jobs in the United States. Many hope to stay in the United States, but most guest-workers return home after six years.

These white-collar guest-workers are the fastest-growing portion of the nation’s unrecognized workforce of roughly 1.25 million foreign college-grade temporary-workers, and they’s replacing experienced American professionals — plus their expensively educated children, and the upwardly striving children of blue-collar parents — in the declining number of jobs that can provide a rewarding and secure livelihood while the nation’s economy is rapidly outsourced, centralized and automated.

The American professionals who are displaced from these prestigious university jobs don’t just go into the woods and die. They flood down into other sectors, such as advocacy and journalism, or step down to lower-tier colleges and companies, where the additional labor-supply drives down white-collar wages paid by other employers.

So how does this off-the-books army of foreign professionals get to take jobs in the United States?

The Fake H-1B Cap

The media almost universally reports that the federal government has set a 65,000 or 85,000 annual cap on the annual number of incoming H-1B white-collar professionals.

Here’s the secret — the H-1B visas given to university hires don’t count against the 85,000 annual cap, according to a 2006 memo approved by George W. Bush’s administration.

Basically, universities are free to hire as many H-1Bs as they like, anytime in the year, for any job that requires a college degree.

The university exemption is so broad that for-profit companies can legally create affiliates with universities so they can exploit the universities’ exemption to hire cheap H-1B professionals. From 2011 to 2014, for example, Dow Chemical, Amgen, Samsung and Monsanto used the university exemption to hire 360 extra H-1B professionals outside the 85,000 annual cap.

That’s not an abuse of the law. It is the purpose of the 2006 memo, and it is entirely legal — providing the foreign professional allocates at least 55 percent of his or her time to work with a research center that is affiliated with a university. Even if an H-1B working at a university’s medical center is hired away by a company that works with the medical center, he’s still exempt from the annual cap.

Each foreign professional with a H-1B visa can stay for three years, and then get another three-year H-1B visa.

All told, the universities and their corporate allies brought in 18,109 “cap exempt” new H-1Bs from January to December 2015. They brought in 17,739 new H-1Bs in 2014, 16,750 in 2013, 14,216 in 2012, 14,484 in 2011, and 13,842 in 2010, according to a website that tracks the visas, MyVisaJobs.com. That’s an accumulated extra resident population of up to 95,140 foreign professionals working in universities in 2015.

Here’s a partial list of H-1B approvals, sorted by university for 2013 and 2014.

The MyVisaJobs.com website shows that the University of Michigan got 165 new H-1B hires in 2014. Harvard brought in 162, Yale hired 132, and so forth. Over the five years up to 2015, Johns Hopkins University accumulated a battalion of roughly 885 new H-1B professionals. That’s 885 prestigious and upwardly mobile jobs that didn’t go to debt-burdened American college-grads.

The Secrets and Aliases of Obama Admin

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Thank you Kimberley but it appears to the rest of the country, the secreted Obama administration goes way beyond emails and aliases. We can start with Fast and Furious and the IRS scandal is by no means the end.

The Obama Secrets Regime

Republicans ban the IRS from private email. But why not all federal employees?

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

WSJ: Some scandals come on fast, and some creep up on Washington. The slow-rolling outrage of 2015—Obama administration secrecy—received a small correction in this week’s omnibus budget bill, but it deserves far more attention. It’s time for the federal government to come back on the grid.

A steady drip of news has shown that for seven years now, the highest (and lowest) echelons of the Obama administration have conducted the people’s business in secret, via private email addresses and other hidden electronic means. They’ve been doing so in contravention of department guidelines, executive orders and statutes that require record-keeping and public accountability. Since those rules are well known and understood, it has to be assumed that they’ve been doing it purposely, to hide their actions.

The New York Times on Thursday revealed the latest email-hider: Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Mr. Carter was confirmed in February, and from the start used a private account to correspond with aides about everything from legislation to media appearances. He may well have discussed far more serious, classified matters, but we don’t know. That’s because we must rely on Mr. Carter’s word that he turned all his work correspondence over to the Defense Department. Just as we must trust that Hillary Clinton didn’t delete anything official from the private server she used as secretary of state.

Speaking of the Democratic front-runner, it seems that Mr. Carter continued to use his private email account for two full months after the news broke about Mrs. Clinton’s ether escapades. So the defense secretary either a) doesn’t read the news; b) thinks rules apply to him even less than they do Mrs. Clinton; or c) felt the secrecy afforded was worth the risk of getting caught. It seems Mr. Carter didn’t stop until White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough—who was watching the Hillary explosion—told him in May to cut it out.

Secrecy aside, this marks the second top Obama national-security official to be caught winging around potentially sensitive information on unsecured email. Mr. Carter has presumably sat in on a few briefings about the growing threat from hackers and the urgent need for better cybersecurity.

One irony of these scandals is that, in seeking to keep government business secret from Americans, officials make it more available to foreign enemies.

Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used private email accounts. She and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack also used email aliases, making it harder for Freedom of Information Act filers to track down correspondence. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius used private email. As did former Acting Labor Secretary Seth Harris, who had three private accounts.

The head of the Chemical Safety Board used a private account and didn’t preserve the correspondence. High-ranking Justice Department officials—including the former head of the criminal division—were off the government grid. Disgraced former IRS official Lois Lerner used two off-reservation email addresses, as well as an internal instant-messaging service that didn’t archive conversations.

When the folks at the top routinely break the rules, the folks lower down figure they get to as well. Mrs. Clinton’s aides conducted business off government servers. A former EPA official strategized over private email with environmental groups about how to shut down the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska. Attorney Chris Horner, of the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, recently unearthed emails showing an EPA official working with outside groups over private email to draft Mr. Obama’s climate regulations.

The Government Business Council this year interviewed 412 “high-level” federal executives about private email. A full one-third admitted it is used at least “sometimes” for government work. (The number was 41% at the Defense Department.) Only 18% said private email is “never” used. And 31% admitted these emails aren’t archived—meaning a big chunk of government business has been deleted from the public record.

Republicans this week included in the omnibus bill a rider that bars IRS employees from using private email for work. The question is why they stopped there. Conservatives complain ceaselessly about the Obama administration’s extralegal or abusive practices, and the record shows a main conduit for these shenanigans is private email. Since we can have no confidence they will provide a full record of their private correspondence, the wiser course is to bar it entirely. For every federal employee.

The best excuse any Obama official has been able to come up with for these accounts is “convenience”—and that’s a hoot in today’s world of easy-to-use technology. More to the point, who ever said federal employees are due “convenience”? They aren’t the average American. Quite the opposite. They serve the average American, and a core duty is to create a public record of their work. If Republicans want a 2016 issue that will resonate with the public, here’s one: End the Obama Secrets Regime.

One last thing….a new release of some Hillary emails and she was told her Blackberry was not an acceptable means of communication by officials at her State Department. She ignored it all.

foia black

Under Obama, Inspector Generals are Stonewalled

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Congress holds hearing for testimony from Inspector Generals. In early 2015, 46 IGs signed their name to a letter expressing concerns that agency officials systematically compromise IG independence by denying them full access.

In 2014:

AmericanThinker: AT News Director Ed Lasky has chronicled the shameful problems with Obama administration inspector generals for years, including the political pressures put on IG’s in almost every department of the administration.

A perfect illustration of this is former DHS IG Charles Edwards, who deliberately slowed investigations into wrongdoing at DHS, including the shredding of dozens of emails – an act that might send him to jail for obstruction of justice.

 

IGs: At Least 20 Investigations Slowed or Closed Due To Obama Admin

FreeBeacon: Numerous inspectors general say that at least 20 investigations have been slowed or closed due to government watchdogs not having access to needed documents or records under the Obama administration.

Dozens of interviews of people with firsthand knowledge of the years-long problem spoke of the tensions between the watchdogs and the administration.

The New York Times reports:

The Drug Enforcement Administration balked at turning over emails from senior officials tied to the raids, according to the department’s inspector general. It took nearly a year of wrangling before the D.E.A. was willing to turn over all its records in a case that the inspector general said raised “serious questions” about agents’ use of deadly force.

The continuing Honduran inquiry is one of at least 20 investigations across the government that have been slowed, stymied or sometimes closed because of a long-simmering dispute between the Obama administration and its own watchdogs over the shrinking access of inspectors general to confidential records, according to records and interviews.

The impasse has hampered investigations into an array of programs and abuse reports — from allegations of sexual assaults in the Peace Corps to the FBI’s terrorism powers, officials said. And it has threatened to roll back more than three decades of policy giving the watchdogs unfettered access to “all records” in their investigations.

“The bottom line is that we’re no longer independent,” Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, said in an interview.

The restrictions reflect a broader effort by the Obama administration to prevent unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information — at the expense, some watchdogs insist, of government oversight.

In recent years, inspector generals have increasingly said the Obama administration is making it more difficult to acquire information as 47 of the 73 government IGs sent a letter to Obama last year for stonewalling their investigations.

The press additionally has chastised the Obama administration for lack of access to records as well. In March 2015, the Obama administration set a record for withholding government information despite promising to lead the most transparent administration in history.