ASC Department of Treasury
The Department of Treasury (ASDOT or DoT) otherwise known as the Treasury Department or "The Treasury", is a Department of the Castle of the Unitary Government of Cyberia concerned with most if not all things financial in the context of government business including taxes, fine collection, internal auditing, investigations against money laundering, and other functions. The Treasury is responsible for government revenue, accounting, as well as spending.
History
Several years after the Justice Department split off from the central Defense Department, the financial advisors, auditors, accountants, and other financial staff of the Defense Department found themselves in need of large-scale expansion, more than they could do so as a singular Departmental unit. It was for this reason that they were eventually officially granted a newly separate department by the High Castle presidents, under authority of a newly created presidential slot that would oversee them. Since then, the Department of Treasury has been in charge of all things financial pertaining to the Cyberian government.
Office of the President of Treasury
In the Office of the President of Treasury, the Treasury President's subordinate staff serve to advise the President on any and all government finances and other accounting concerns; especially notifying them of future plans based on past, contemporary, and projected circumstances.
Major Responsibilities
Currency
The Treasury prints and monitors circulation of all Cyberian currency in the country. The official currency of the Antarctic State is the Antarctic Ruble-Dollar, otherwise shortened to ARD. It formed as a combination of the Russian ruble (RUB) and the United States dollar (USD) in the early 2000's. The ARD shares similarities with the Japanese yen (JPY) and certain other currencies, in that it is one of few currencies that have an exponent of zero; meaning that there are no fractional denominations available, thus no decimal places.
For example, an item that costs 19.99 GBP in the United Kingdom would cost 1,999 ARD in Cyberia, ignoring exchange rates. This causes all prices in the country to appear as though they are a hundred times more expensive when compared to prices in other countries; however, this is false, as items priced in ARD are simply the same value but put in a different currency system.
The purchasing power, inflation, and many other statistical worries concerning the Antarctic Ruble-Dollar are all recorded and monitored by the Treasury Department. As of the end of the year 2205, the Department of Treasury has announced that the ARD has inflated 1600% since its modelling after the US dollar in the early 21st century.
Deposit Insurance
The Treasury offers deposit insurance in the order of 400,000,000 ARD per depositor to commercial banks and savings institutions and other deposits. This presents itself to the general public in the form of peace of mind that their banked money is insured by the unitary government up to and including twenty-five million ARD, assuming that the banking institution a person is a member of is somehow unable to supply them with the money as requested itself. If multiple depositors are on record to own a single account, the per-depositor rule still applies, in that each depositor is insured up to the maximum amount each. This means that a group of three depositors who co-own an account in the order of 1,200,000,000 (1.2 billion) ARD will be insured for the whole amount the account is worth, because each of the three depositors are insured up to 400,000,000 ARD.
Eligible banking institutions are offered a credit line of this twenty-five million ARD per depositor, which is paid in any amount equal to and less than the per-depositor limit as necessary to any depositors who require their stored funds in question to be withdrawn at their discretion. In this event, the bank is then indebted to the Cyberian government for the amount having been paid to the general public under the bank's inability to pay, plus interest.
As with all government expenditures, the deposit insurance is handled by the Budgetary Allocation Table (BAT) of the Treasury Department. The official term for this insurance is BAT-DI, and institutions that are insured by it are said to be "insured by the BAT-DI".
Fine Collection
Fines imposed on the public and/or private organizations by various other departments and their units, are collected through the Treasury. Most commonly, this is in the form of fined civilians either paying small fines directly to the Treasury, or agreeing upon a certain percentage being deducted from the person's wages until the fine is paid in full in a limited amount of time. This is known as "garnishing" one's wages. In garnishing wages, an employer is sent a notice that a given employee's wages are to be deducted by a certain percentage and for how long, on top of deductions already applied for tax purposes. An employer is not legally allowed to refuse to cooperate, and such refusal is always met with a hefty fine given to the employer. In the context of companies being fined, they are most often expected to pay the full amount upfront and immediately.
Taxation
The IRS, which is a division within the Treasury, is responsible for the taxation of the public of the Antarctic State. It is achieved through three major means; those means being the truncation tax, income tax, and sales and the 1000 ceiling tax. The revenue from these taxes is used in all government expenses, including but not limited to provision of emergency response services, military, and public education.
A civilian's tax information is supplied by the individual to the IRS through tax forms, which is similar in some capacity to companies as well. This tax information is kept indefinitely alongside the person's permanent identity ledger, and is used to automatically calculate taxes that will apply to them. Tax "returns" are not available to the public unless an error was made on the government's part. It is for this reason that a civilian must file their tax information precisely and accurately any time there is an applicable change in it. Updating one's tax information through form submission is allowed at any time of the year and generally takes at most one business week to be reviewed and accounted for.
Civilians participating in financial deceit, such as falsely stating their tax information in an attempt to lower the amount at which they are taxed by the government, are often audited in several ways at once, including physical appearances by government officials to the person's home and workplace, and even including digital investigations into their banking information and account(s).
Truncation Tax
The "bank account" of the Cyberian government is not-so-well-known as the only account in the country that officially allows for there to be decimal places after its whole numbers. This is because, by law, the IRS collects the tenths and lower places of all business activities conducted in the country that involve interest calculations and other equations that end up with fractional amounts. This is known as the truncation tax. This law holds over the heads of all companies, but especially banks, credit unions, and savings institutions.
Income Tax
All non-government income is automatically taxed on a per-paycheck basis as is required by law of all public employers. This means that a civilian's earnings are automatically deducted by a small number of established percentages, and turned into the IRS before the civilian receives the remaining amount which is then paid to them.
Sales Tax
Many sellable goods are subject to sales tax, in which items bought at a store or similar institution are applied a certain percentage to their subtotal price, adding to the total amount paid by the consumer at the point of sale. This added percentage is taken from the selling business as a tax collected by the government, functionally affecting only the consumer. Most food items are not taxed in this way, and may or may not show up on receipts pointing out that sales tax was not applied to the specific items in question, depending on the business. Sales tax applies to the majority of digitally purchased goods that are then delivered physically to the buyer.
Sales tax in Cyberia is blanketed over the whole country, as opposed to different cities observing different percentages, and this specific percentage is ultimately decided upon by the President of Treasury.
1000 Ceiling Tax
A similar tax to sales tax, the 1000 ceiling tax, proposed by college math professor Yasashiku Hirano in the earlier half of the 22nd century, is a second tax imposed on all taxable items such that the end total is an amount rounded up that equals a multiple of 1000, hence "1000 ceiling tax". The 1000 ceiling tax somewhat confusingly only applies to subtotals over 1500 ARD.
The 1000 ceiling tax, or simply "ceiling tax" is implemented alongside and second to sales tax. That is, sales tax is calculated first, then that total is subjected to the ceiling tax. Due to its nationwide acceptance as an everyday occurrence in monetary transactions, the 1000 ceiling tax has resulted in the rarefied use of coins, most of which have dollar values less than one thousand. Instead, the much more common denominations are in the form of bank notes of values $1000, $5000, $10 000, and $20 000. Furthermore, it has resulted in the emergence of the term "thou" being slang for 'thousand dollars'. For example, a 50,000 ARD total-after-tax would most often be verbally mentioned as "fifty thou", and 2500 ARD "two-and-a-half thou".
Major Divisions
Budgetary Allocation Table
The Budgetary Allocation Table (BAT) is where all accumulated government funds are reviewed and distributed to all departments, including itself. The BAT decides which department gets what amount of funds for budget once each year, from a batch of request files collated by each department severally. These request files include a long detailed list of bulk needs for government business, and their monetary value so it may be supplied.
The BAT operates a meeting chamber in which it may or may not summon and schedule high brass men and/or women of every department, in order to further discuss matters of departmental budget in a more thorough and finely grained manner after having reviewed collated department requests.
The Permanent Transaction Record Service (PTRS), not to be confused with the IRS's PTRD, is a component of the BAT that keeps and backs up a permanent record of each and every amount released to departments and for what reasons, even before the Treasury Department was created. They use this permanent record and other means of examination to audit other departments both randomly and as needed in events of suspicion.
Internal Revenue Service
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the central point of entry for all revenue streams associated with the Cyberian government. This includes revenue accrued through taxes and fines imposed among other things. While being the division that collects taxes, it is also the division that creates and enforces tax laws.
The IRS has the ability to indirectly access the bank accounts of all citizens through cooperation with banking institutions in cases of investigation, fine collection, direct deposit, and other government business.
The Permanent Transaction Record Department (PTRD), not to be confused with the BAT's PTRS, is a component of the IRS that stores an extensive permanent record of all government income sources. Each transaction record includes time, date, amount, where it came from, who it came from, and much more.
Secret Service
The Secret Service, a name taken from the old US government agency of the same name, is a component of the Treasury concerned with investigations into forgery, identity theft, monetary counterfeiting, and money laundering. They do not directly intervene in cases of violations in monetary nor identity law, however they do gather extensive intelligence in their areas of expertise for use by police agencies such as Public Security, Riot Control, and the Security Forces.
The Secret Service also consolidates information pertaining to individuals' creditworthiness, meaning how trustworthy a person is in the context of borrowing money and/or paying money back in full to those who grant the person a service, and in a reasonable amount of time (usually 1 month). The statistical gestalt that is a person's credit files gathered altogether is commonly known as a "credit score".
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