Opinion ID: 2646723
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The “customarily kept” requirement

Text: The second Grosso prong requires that the regulated “information is to be obtained by requiring the preservation of records of a kind which the regulated party has customarily kept.” Grosso, 390 U.S. at 68.6 Doe points to no cases in which any court has held that records are not required because they are not “customarily kept.” The records required by 31 C.F.R. § 1010.420 are very basic – they “shall contain the name in which each [] account is maintained, the number or other designation of such account, the name and address of the foreign bank or other person with whom such account is maintained, the type of such account, and the maximum value of each such account during the reporting period.” In determining that the records at issue are “customarily kept,” the district court 6 Citing Bouknight, the Government urges us to hold that this is no longer a requirement of the required records doctrine. Although Bouknight did not discuss the second Grosso prong, it was an atypical “required records” case that does not dictate our analysis here, as the regulated “evidence” was Bouknight’s infant. See 493 U.S. at 556‐ 62. Perhaps the Bouknight Court did not feel it necessary to discuss whether a child is “customarily kept” by his parents. We need not decide this issue for the purposes of this opinion as the “customarily kept” prong is easily met here. 22 relied in large part on the fact that another section of the BSA requires foreign account holders to report substantially identical information to the IRS. See 31 C.F.R. § 1010.350(a). Doe contends that this reasoning is “tautological” in that it permits Congress to manufacture a “custom” in order to satisfy the required records doctrine by requiring that the records be kept. We need not address whether, in another case, records “customarily kept” only because they are required by law satisfy the prerequisites of the required records doctrine. Here, the grand jury’s subpoena seeks information so basic that the “argument that these records are not ‘customarily kept’ is a non‐starter.” Grand Jury Proceedings, No. 4‐10, 707 F.3d at 1273. “A bank account’s beneficiary necessarily has access to such essential information as the bank’s name, the maximum amount held in the account each year, and the account number.” M.H., 648 F.3d at 1076. “[C]ommon sense” dictates that beneficiaries keep these records “in part because they need the information to access their foreign bank accounts.” Id. The amount of money in the account is relevant to most foreign bank account holders in that many people are regularly forced to assess prospective purchases against the balance of their accounts. Most people check a bank account before making a major purchase; not everyone who holds a foreign 23 bank account could, without a second thought, incur (for example) vast litigation costs in a feckless attempt to avoid paying lawfully‐imposed taxes vital to the functioning of the United States without needing to assess whether losing such a challenge would leave them incapable of paying the inevitable hefty sanctions. And even if the account holder is a person of great wealth surely they want to know where that wealth is located. Doe believes that, despite the basic presumption that bank account owners know the location of their money, some individuals engaged in wrongdoing are advised not to keep even this basic information.7 But even if those who possess foreign bank accounts for the purposes of avoiding some specific U.S. tax or criminal laws may be less likely to maintain these records, the BSA covers the entire group of foreign bank account holders. We decline to look at the custom of only the miscreants among the larger group of foreign bank account holders.