[drzaiusapelord]

Not a criminal, but someone interested in this kind of thing. From what I've read and heard, cash-based businesses are best because its really hard to prove otherwise. The IRS is going to see a car wash doing $1m a year in sales and that'll be it. It can't access any other records to prove otherwise because you're a mostly, if not all, cash business. You become your own customer and funnel your money into the company. You would easily survive an audit here.

So any cash-based business is good. Restaurants, car washes, pawn shops, bars/clubs, etc. These types of businesses can make thousands per day gross and are relatively easy to run with low capital down. That's going to be far superior than shipping hundreds of overpriced hard drives per week via e-commerce and hoping to god no one traces back all these credit cards back to you or your pals.

[jon-wood]

With something like a bar can't the IRS demand to see receipts for the drinks you've bought, and realise you've sold $100,000 worth of whiskey, but only actually bought a few bottles?

[drzaiusapelord]

Probably. If you want to be audit proof you can keep your inventory sane. The nice part about these businesses is that they're all high margin. Your wholesaler cost for whiskey may have only been $1,000 that month and arguably you could have made $50,000 in whiskey sales considering the cost per shot at a upscale or even non-dive club.

You can learn the basics of accounting and laundering over a weekend if you had to and learn just enough to avoid being flagged by the IRS. Hell, some accountants specialize in these kinds of things.

I also think that you need to accept some level of risk here and that you'll be dealing with audits periodically. Auditing isn't some scary process, more than likely you'll be dinged for more taxes and not be put in jail. You'll come out ahead, especially when you consider outsourcing laundering is very expensive, something like 50-70% and depending on how it comes back to you, that money is also taxable, so another 25% lost on what's left. Running your own business means you only lose that 25% and some overhead.