154
Blackmun, J., dissenting
of that construction, Congress' 1986 enactment prohibited structuring "for the purpose of evading the reporting requirements." The level of knowledge imposed by the term "willfully" as it applies to all the underlying offenses in the subchapter on reporting requirements is "knowledge of the reporting requirements." 5
The Court next concludes that its interpretation of "willfully" is warranted because structuring is not inherently "nefarious." See ante, at 144. It is true that the Court, on occasion, has imposed a knowledge-of-illegality requirement upon criminal statutes to ensure that the defendant acted with a wrongful purpose. See, e. g., Liparota v. United
States, 498 U. S. 192, 200 (1991), despite this Court's restriction of that standard's application to the tax context, see United States v. Sturman, 951 F. 2d 1466, 1476 (CA6 1991), or were referring simply to the reporting requirements as the "law" that one must know and actually applied the dominant standard from Granda, see Bank of New England, 821 F. 2d, at 854; United States v. Warren, 612 F. 2d 887, 890 (CA5 1980). This understanding is supported by Granda's statement that "the proper instruction would include some discussion of the defendant's ignorance of the law since the defendant's alleged ignorance of the reporting requirements goes to the heart of his or her denial of the specific intent necessary to commit the crime." 565 F. 2d, at 926 (emphasis added).
5 "Knowledge of the reporting requirements" is easily confused with "knowledge of illegality" because, in the context of the other reporting provisions—§§ 5313, 5314, and 5316—the entity that can "willfully violate" each provision is also the entity charged with the reporting duty; as a result, a violation with "knowledge of the reporting requirements" necessarily entails the entity's knowledge of the illegality of its conduct (that is, its failure to file a required report). In contrast, § 5324 prohibits a customer from purposefully evading a bank's reporting requirements, so knowledge of the reporting requirements does not collapse into actual knowledge that the customer's own conduct is prohibited. Under the cases interpreting the statute as well as fundamental principles of criminal law, it is one's knowledge of the reporting requirements, not "knowledge of the illegality of one's conduct," that makes a violation "willful." Moreover, as explained below, Congress in 1992 rejected the majority's construction when it enacted a parallel antistructuring provision for attempts to evade § 5316's reporting requirements. See infra, at 161-162.
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