{"id":22105,"date":"2025-07-08T06:00:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-08T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/?p=22105"},"modified":"2025-04-10T13:27:29","modified_gmt":"2025-04-10T18:27:29","slug":"hidden-income-in-a-cash-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/hidden-income-in-a-cash-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Hidden Income in a Cash Business"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/steal-money.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"lazyload alignright wp-image-12025\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/steal-money.jpg\" data-orig-src=\"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/steal-money.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"238\" height=\"158\" srcset=\"data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%27%20width%3D%27238%27%20height%3D%27158%27%20viewBox%3D%270%200%20238%20158%27%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%27238%27%20height%3D%27158%27%20fill-opacity%3D%220%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/steal-money-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/steal-money.jpg 425w\" data-sizes=\"auto\" data-orig-sizes=\"(max-width: 238px) 100vw, 238px\" \/><\/a>I love working on divorce cases where one spouse is trying to hide money.<\/p>\n<p>When a business owner has a cash business and is getting divorced, sometimes the income coincidentally (or not so coincidentally!) drops dramatically.<\/p>\n<p>What can we do to investigate that? It&#8217;s hard. The business owner knows that cash leaves no paper trail and is difficult to prove.<\/p>\n<p>But all is not lost. There are techniques we can use to find indirect proof of the amount of cash a business should be generating (even if the owner isn&#8217;t reporting all of it).<!--more-->We can do things like:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Look at payroll records. If you&#8217;re not earning income, why do you need so many employees?<\/li>\n<li>Find expenses that usually move in step with income. If the income has really decreased, those expenses should decrease too.<\/li>\n<li>Look at cash income versus credit card income. This works especially well in a business like a restaurant. If we see that credit card income has stayed stable but cash income has dropped, that&#8217;s suspicious.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This is not direct proof of hidden income. But if we can find multiple ways to prove income indirectly, a judge may be more likely to believe there is indeed hidden income.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I love working on divorce cases where one spouse is trying to hide money. When a business owner has a cash business and is getting divorced, sometimes the income coincidentally (or not so coincidentally!) drops dramatically. What can we do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2218,810],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-divorce-and-family-law","category-financial-investigations"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/steal-money.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-5Kx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22118,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22105\/revisions\/22118"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}