gold sales records

Miscellaneous General
1

When you purchase or sell gold in the form of bullion coin, can the government obtain a record of this purchase? To provide context for this question, consider the following purely hypothetical case:

A man steadily converts his wealth to gold over a number of years. As he gets on in years, he hands his son an envelope with instructions to tell no one of its existance and to open it only after his death. The man eventually passes on and a will is read. The son inherits a house and a very small amount of cash. No one knows about the envelope. He opens it and finds a series of gps co-ordinates. The co-ordinates lead him to an extremely remote area of the southwestern desert where he finds several large caches of gold.

If he sells the gold, he would be responsible only for income tax? And nothing else. Am I correct?

2

Responsible for capital gains more likely. Normally inheritance taxes are much higher so he might still find himself having to produce a receipt for the gold. There are other factors, like who did he sell it to? How much per transaction although Elliot Spitzer was discovered making $3000 withdraws in cash. So the $10,000 amount is not really the minimum.

3

I believe that sometime during the 90s, precious metal dealers were dragged into the reporting requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act.

I’ve seen pieces like this one from January of 2004, bitching about the impending impact of the regulations. But I haven’t been able to dig up a definite confirmation that dealers were dragged into the BSA compliance regime. Anyone know for sure?