So I'm about to start up a SR3 campaign, and one of the things that's come up in prepping is dealing with idendities, clean/dirty money and taxes.

To approach this i've suggested a "House rule" to the group that leans up towards some of the info from sourcebooks like Sprawl survival guide, but moves things on to make things a little easier.

The suggestion is basically that the runners can maintain fake ID's of a given rating as usual. These are used to buy legal stuff like renting a safe house/crash pad under that ID, purchasing a car, or buying every day commodities. So far so good.

My suggestion for simplifying the process is that once the runners make money from a run, that money will usually tend to be paid out in certified cred sticks or similar. Runners will need to transfer some of that money to their real SIN'ed ID's to help maintain life styles, and to have some ready cash to flash in places where people might turn their heads at waving a certified stick around (e.g. high class establishments would be more used to peple using their identified sticks/accounts to pay for things than a ready lump sum - just like most people would pay for a new car on a credit card than carry in a suitcase full of crumpled notes today i guess).
The legal/fake ID's obviously have the added advantage of allowing potential for travel (as long as checks are passed of course), might get you out of a simple situation like getting uplled over for speeding, etc.
To facilitate the process of maintaining an ID, it is registered for paying taxes. A decker or similar can label a cred transfer for "consultancy fees, or even salary from a registered company if the runners create one (slightly further down the line in the campaign). So to make things easy, tax is deducted at the moment of transfer to the ID rather than having to mess about endlessly with annual tax returns and such like (we're not playing shadow accountants). Its been a while since i've been through all sourcebooks, but the rate i recalled from Shadowbeat was 30% income tax. I've lowered this to 25%.
So if a runner gets 2,000 transferred to a legal ID'ed stick, taxes will eat 500 and leave 1,500 to spend.

The rest of runners funds are basically kept on cetified sticks, or in shadow bank accounts once they gets these established. These will of course not be taxed and can be used to buy stuff from fixers etc as usual, but they are difficult to use for legal purchses above a few hundred nuyen.

I'm interested in hearing other peoples take on this - is the tax rate too high? Does anyone have any other references of tax rates that I have missed? Do you have pointers to other systems to maintain money and idendities that work without making this element one of overriding complexity?

Actually I really like this question.

Basically how does a Shadowrunner launder his money ?

Talk about a data-trail you leave behind. And I know that at least for us Dutch people, the equivalent of the IRS is a worse way of being caught then being caught with the gun smoking.

Almost every major criminal (mostly drug related) is convicted on tax-evasion. The lesser ones, they are convicted on actual crimes.

***

So, how would you launder your Shadowrunning income ?

Some ideas.

I read that page before establishing my highly simplified version.
I'm starting out a low-level campaign where the characters are just breaking into the world of shadowrunning. So it would seem a fair bit above them to have to set up CaribLeague banking accounts at this stage.
Later on, once they either end up with a "hot" stick or have accumulated enough wealth to make them paranoid about sitting on certified sitcks which can be stolen - these aspects will probably become the route they need to take.

At low levels, the easiest way would be to have them simply turn over the cash to be laundered to a contact who washes it and removes his fee.

I have also thought about momney laudering before.

My conclusion is thus: it adds a retarded amount of complexity for the Players to manage their earned money. Or, if you go for the simple route, which is to use something like Brokerage X to handle your money, you're basically arbitrarily and systematically taking x% off the top of the characters' money. And for what? Will the players enjoy the extra work or money spent? Will it add to their pleasure of playing Shadowrun? Unless you have a group with a strong accouting bent, the answer is no.

So fuck money laudering is what I say.

I'd say just assume the fixer is laundering the money for the runners and taking his cut off the top. Its unmentioned money to them, because he says "I can pay you 10grand" instead of "I can pay you 12,500, but then I'm gonna charge you 2,500 to make sure it doesn't get traced back to me or you."

Thanks for the feedback guys. I appreciate that most people (including myself) does not want to make it a big deal that has to be carefully monitored at all times.
Having said that, i'm still a little reluctant to put it all on autofixer and just ignor it completely. Checking those certified credsticks for tracers helps add a healthy dose of paranoia, and simply slushing some funds over to a couple of fake ID's hopefully should not be too cumbersome. I feel that it opens up some possibilities for runs.
Also, living today without a social security -type number is laready difficult, and while cash is still prolific, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get paid with having a bank account for example. So in the 2060's i'd expect this to be even more of an issue than today.

Whomever made that money laundering thing. Awesome.

My players, and myself are actually quite interested in somewhat realistic problems to slap their characters with, even in Shadowrun situations. That's mainly because we have huge downtimes between physical games, and so we do have the time to write out those things.

So, this is quite interesting.

I had a runner once who was a professional gambler. He claimed all of his money was from cash games and other such endeavors as gambling is mostly legal in all major countries. I need to resurrect that face for SR4

We simply use the simple expedient, but yes, my Players like it, even though none are accounting fetishists. The thing is, they like the feel of having to launder money, just like they like the feeling of having to "go deep" in the Shadows, maybe even loosing any lifestyles they have set up higher than a Low, when they make a run that draws allot of attention.

That is part of the game, especially in 3rd and earlier editions and I (and they) think it an important one. IT is the reason you keep extra lower lifestyles you can run and hide in, or sometimes just live on the Street itself, or under it, in areas of town even Runners usually hate to frequent, when they have done something high profile and is THE reason why a good Runner passes on some jobs that look cherry on the surface.

It even brings to mind a few questions to the gallery...but I won't gum up this thread with them. I'll start a new one in a few minutes and ask them there.


Isshia

Thanks for the replies guys. There are obviously divided opinions, but I think i'll try out my suggested system and see how it goes. It is somwhere to start at least, and it can be expanded if there seems to be a need for it.