Page:Bittner v. United States.pdf/30

10 leads to absurd results. Its concerns range from the overstated to the incorrect, and they are in any event of limited relevance to the statutory interpretation question before us.

First, the Court posits a comparison between a person who nonwillfully violates the law once by failing to report a single account with a balance of $10 million and a person who nonwillfully violates the law 12 times by failing to report 12 accounts with an aggregate balance of $10,001. Because the first is subject to a maximum penalty of $10,000 and the second is subject to a maximum penalty of $120,000, the Court concludes that there is an “incongruity” in the statutory scheme. But a person who violates the law many times might naturally pay a steeper price than a person who violates the law just once, regardless of the balances in their unreported accounts. Indeed, the Court seems untroubled by the incongruity that flows from its own reading: The Secretary is constrained by the same maximum penalty ($10,000) for a person who nonwillfully fails to report 100 accounts on an annual FBAR as he is for a person who nonwillfully fails to report just 1 account. The per-form reading makes it difficult for the Government to assess stiffer penalties for more serious noncompliance.

Consider next the Court’s claim that, on the Government’s reading, those who willfully violate the law may face lower penalties than those who nonwillfully violate the law. Ibid. The Court provides the example of a person who holds $1 million in a foreign account during the course of a year but withdraws those funds before the filing deadline and willfully fails to report the account. Under §5321(a)(5)(C), that person faces a maximum penalty of $100,000, while a person who nonwillfully fails to report 20 accounts with an aggregate account balance of $50,000 might face a penalty of up to $200,000 under §5321(a)(5)(B)(i). This is not an apples-to-apples comparison: The first person willfully violated the law once, while the second nonwillfully violated