I wasn't talking about the banks. I was talking about the small shop on the corner where poor people go to buy things. Not all places to spend money are owned by megacorporations. There are only a handful of corporations that are Extrateritorial. There are many, many smaller companies that are not. These companies require tax records. On the other hand, this is where certified credit comes in. There will be no intermediate SIN, just a transaction from the bank to the company.




I guess I was always under the impression that SIN was an internationally agreed upon system, much like the matrix. Your SIN can have citizenship "tags" attached, but the SIN carries over from one corporation/nation to another. The whole purpose of a SIN is to be unique and universal, thus ensuring, at least in the eyes of governments and corporations, each person is accounted for. If each country had its own system, verification would be less reliable. It would be a whole lot easier to order a SIN from a shadow organization in a smaller, corrupt nation, rather than struggling with a monolithic beaurocracies of the UCAS or CAS. Different SINs from different countries would have different costs. I imagine getting a false ID from Tir Nan Og would would cost tremendously more than, say, something from a collapsing South American nation.

Smaller companies may not have the muscle of the Megas, but neither is the government likely to be auditing their books with the same frequency. "Small Businesses" have always been far less regulated than larger firms, and I see no reason for that to have changed in 2070 - it's a LOT of manpower (even backed up bt agent programs) to catch every obfuscated line item or scan every recipt for a proper ID check. More likely, what we'd see is more along the lines of "OK, the owners income was X, the shop's profit was Y, the store paid taxes on Y, so I guess that's close enough".


As a rule, yes, that was the theory, regarding the agreed standard. But the prefix on your Social Security Number - let's fave it, the precursor to the SiN - was originally supposed to identify the geographical area of your birth. I remember in some older fluff (maybe SR3 or earlier) that the SiN number itself actually included formatted origin and date information. And just because systems for setting up an ID are standard, you're right on the money about it being easier to fake a new ID from birth in a smaller country.
Unfortunately, financially, for the 'runner, the biggest cost isn't really that entry into a couple of national ID banks. The thing that makes the ID usable is the cross-links to all the other things that it's used for in 2070. So once you make that first entry, to make it usable, you have to do a lot of legwork. One of the things that would complicate an international ID for daily use would be a Visa and a Green Card authorization. Both of those servers are probably as heavily guarded as the main ID banks, so why not just make it an ID for the right country in the first place?
Upon mature consideration, that's probably exactly what the very low rating IDs are, and WHY they trip up so easily: the first (mandatory) cross-check against imigration for travel purposes comes up with a big red flag since you didn't have the talent/time/energy/interest to actually hack those databases.

Are you familiar with Sarbanes-Oxley? It is an auditing system that absorbs way too much manpower and is very picky about details. This is the result of Enron and other big (by our modern standards) companies playing with creative accounting. I imagine that the government would put significant effort into collecting every single bit of tax revenue from companies within its domain. With the kind of computing power available, audits would be much easier, and more frequent. Small business would not be immune, especially since they would have less legal resources than larger corporations to fight tax collectors. If individual SINs can be tracked for advertising purposes, then small companies don't have a prayer of evading tax audits. The only way to prove income is to show where it came from.



Yeah, I see your point. While it might be easier to have a fake ID from some small, obscure, corrupt government, getting a fake Visa to import that SIN across borders would be as difficult, if not moreso, then just getting a local fake ID. A funny way to think about is that when you travel, your SIN is actually crossing borders, and you are just the meatbag along for the ride.

Oh, not arguing THAT point, but you said it yourself: "the government would put significant effort into collecting every single bit of tax revenue from companies within its domain". As long as the taxes paid match the purchases made, they're happy. I don't see them wasting the resources to verify each purchase had a valid ID check if it's under a certain threshold. Let me put this another way: an audit is mainly interested in checking the books of the company, verifying accounting for where the money came in, and where it went. But the amount of data contained in a single transactional record is extremely large. Think of that as the government telling the company "OK, we see where every penny of money came in routed through your legitimate accounts, but we want to see evere credit card charge and register slip to make sure you're in compliance with BlahBlah regulation." And even if they did, would they check the "yes, I checked" digit (think "enter birthdate" for purchase of alcohol/tobacco in a grocery store) or will they want to make sure the original info WAS VALID? Nope, that's more effort than it's worth, because it DOES NOT GENERATE REVENUE.
So it's not that a small business WON'T get audited, it's that the information we're talking about here in the thread (SiNs and Licenses and IDs and such) wouldn't be at the TOP of their list.
An exception might be a small company careless enough to be caught catering to the SiNless AND be greedy enough to get audited AND CAUGHT. THEN the government is going to pull all those receipts and start trying to track down each verification. (*sighs* yes, GMs, I KNOW I just gave you an idea. Just don't tell the players it was me.)
Do you see the distinction I'm trying to draw? You're right on about general accounting practices and accountability blah blah blah, but the SiN data, while recorded, isn't of particular interest unless something draws their attention specifically to it for some reason. And IF that's the case, a store could save money and time by being slip-shod in the mandatory verifican steps, just enough to get the 3rd party broker to sign off on the funds transfer, and that's about it.

As an interesting factoid... Sarbanes-Oxley only applies to publicly traded companies...

All but two of the Megas are publicity traded iirc.

And being Mega's, they are expressley exempt from regulation by Extrateritoriality.

BUT... Not all Non-Megas are Publically Traded...

Ah, yes, finally the logic sinks in. The books must balance, so incoming money and the outgoing money must balance. The money tracking stops where the company stops. In theory, the IDs of customers was already checked at the time of purchase, so the government doesn't need to check it again.

Thank you for your patience



I am sure that only exists because of time and effort restrictions. Okay, so there might be some kind of privacy rights involved, too, but in 2070, I imagine citizen's rights have been eroded quite a bit in the name of national financial security. They can also check that the money balances without ever having a person look at the private data. A computer program does all the checking, reports a clean bill of health, or not, and moves on to the next audit.

Was mentioned because the GOVERNMENT only cares about Publically Traded Companies... Private Companies are generally audited by the Company Assets iteself, with absolutely no government oversight required, and probably not wanted anyway...

Sure, Audits can be completed painlessly and quickly using computer modeling and software... but that can be subverted fairly easily in the private sector... Sarbanes-Oxley was implemented to provide oversight to those companies in the Public Sector to eliminate such practices...

No thanks needed. That's why we've got this particular thread: to improve everybody's UNDERSTANDING of this drek, and hopefully come to some kind of community wide consensus on things not expressly deliniated in the RAW. Besides, it's a pleasant brain exercise that helps me relax.