Opinion ID: 109005
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: fourth amendment challenge to the foreign reporting requirements

Text: The District Court, in differentiating for constitutional purposes between the foreign reporting requirements and the domestic reporting requirements imposed by the Secretary, relied upon our opinion in United States v. U. S. District Court, 407 U. S. 297 (1972), for the proposition that Government surveillance in the area of foreign relations is in some instances subject to less constitutional restraint than would be similar activity in domestic affairs. Our analysis does not take us over this ground. The plenary authority of Congress to regulate foreign commerce, and to delegate significant portions of this power to the Executive, is well established. C. & S. Air Lines v. Waterman Corp., 333 U. S. 103, 109 (1948); Norwegian Nitrogen Products Co. v. United States, 288 U. S. 294 (1933). Plaintiffs contend that in exercising that authority to require reporting of previously described foreign financial transactions, Congress and the Secretary have abridged their Fourth Amendment rights. The familiar language of the Fourth Amendment protects [t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. . . . Since a statute requiring the filing and subsequent publication of a corporate tax return has been upheld against a Fourth Amendment challenge, Flint v. Stone Tracy Co., 220 U. S. 107, 174-176 (1911), reporting requirements are by no means per se violations of the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, a contrary holding might well fly in the face of the settled sixty-year history of self-assessment of individual and corporate income taxes in the United States. This Court has on numerous occasions recognized the importance of the self-regulatory aspects of that system, and interests of the Congress in enforcing it: In assessing income taxes the Government relies primarily upon the disclosure by the taxpayer of the relevant facts. This disclosure it requires him to make in his annual return. To ensure full and honest disclosure, to discourage fraudulent attempts to evade the tax, Congress imposes sanctions. Such sanctions may confessedly be either criminal or civil. Helvering v. Mitchell, 303 U. S. 391, 399 (1938). To the extent that the reporting requirements of the Act and the settled practices of the tax collection process are similar, this history must be overcome by those who argue that the reporting requirements are a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Plaintiffs contend, however, that Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616 (1886), establishes the invalidity of the foreign reporting requirement under the Fourth Amendment, and that the particular requirements imposed are so indiscriminate in their nature that the regulations must be deemed to be the equivalent of a general warrant of the kind condemned as obnoxious to the Fourth Amendment in cases such as Stanford v. Texas, 379 U. S. 476 (1965). We do not think these cases would support plaintiffs even if their contentions were directed at the domestic reporting requirements; in light of the fact that the foreign reporting requirements deal with matters in foreign commerce, we think plaintiffs' reliance on the cases to challenge those requirements must fail. Boyd v. United States, supra , is a case which has been the subject of repeated citation, discussion, and explanation since the time of its decision 88 years ago. In Communist Party v. SACB, 367 U. S. 1 (1961), the Court described the Boyd holding as follows: The Boyd case involved a statute providing that in proceedings other than criminal arising under the revenue laws, the Government could secure an order of the court requiring the production by an opposing claimant or defendant of any documents under his control which, the Government asserted, might tend to prove any of the Government's allegations. If production were not made, the allegations were to be taken as confessed. On the Government's motion, the District Court had entered such an order, requiring the claimants in a forfeiture proceeding to produce a specified invoice. Although the claimants objected that the order was improper and the statute unconstitutional in coercing self-incriminatory disclosures and permitting unreasonable searches and seizures, they did, under protest, produce the invoice, which was, again over their constitutional objection, admitted into evidence. This Court held that on such a record a judgment for the United States could not stand, and that the statute was invalid as repugnant to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Id., at 110. But the Boyd Court recognized that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit all requirements that information be made available to the Government: [T]he supervision authorized to be exercised by officers of the revenue over the manufacture or custody of excisable articles, and the entries thereof in books required by law to be kept for their inspection, are necessarily excepted out of the category of unreasonable searches and seizures. 116 U. S., at 623-624. Stanford v. Texas, supra , involved a warrant issued by a state judge which described petitioner's home and authorized the search and seizure of books, records, pamphlets, cards, receipts, lists, memoranda, pictures, recordings and other written instruments concerning the Communist Party of Texas. This Court found the warrant to be an unconstitutional general warrant, and invalidated the search and seizure conducted pursuant to it. Unlike the situation in Stanford, the Secretary's regulations do not authorize indiscriminate rummaging among the records of the plaintiffs, nor do the reports they require deal with literary material as in Stanford; the information sought is about commerce, not literature. The reports of foreign financial transactions required by the regulations must contain information as to a relatively limited group of financial transactions in foreign commerce, and are reasonably related to the statutory purpose of assisting in the enforcement of the laws of the United States. Of primary importance, in addition, is the fact that the information required by the foreign reporting requirements pertains only to commercial transactions which take place across national boundaries. Mr. Chief Justice Taft, in his opinion for the Court in Carroll v. United States, 267 U. S. 132 (1925), observed: Travellers may be so stopped in crossing an international boundary because of national self protection reasonably requiring one entering the country to identify himself as entitled to come in, and his belongings as effects which may be lawfully brought in. Id., at 154. This settled proposition has been reaffirmed as recently as last Term in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U. S. 266, 272 (1973). If reporting of income may be required as an aid to enforcement of the federal revenue statutes, and if those entering and leaving the country may be examined as to their belongings and effects, all without violating the Fourth Amendment, we see no reason to invalidate the Secretary's regulations here. The statutory authorization for the regulations was based upon a conclusion by Congress that international currency transactions and foreign financial institutions were being used by residents of the United States to circumvent the enforcement of the laws of the United States. The regulations are sufficiently tailored so as to single out transactions found to have the greatest potential for such circumvention and which involve substantial amounts of money. They are therefore reasonable in the light of that statutory purpose, and consistent with the Fourth Amendment.