For an upcoming campaign the character I intend on playing is a Nikto entrepreneur with a true lust for credits. His #1 priority is protecting and, if possible, improving his investments. (Investments can be anything, from special contacts to other PCs in the party.) My PC was part of a group of enslaved/indentured Nikto accountants forced to hide a mid-ranking Hutt's financial dirty work. He escaped and now uses his knowledge of legal and illegal finance to improve his investments. What I'm imagining is the Andy Dufrene way of handling and hiding money, where one takes a mass sum of money and makes it disappear without a paper trail. Are there other ways to break the system? Is there anything similar to check kiting in the star wars universe?

This is where I am at a loss. I am not too terribly informed on how the Imperials record one's assets or how taxes are collected. Do free-roaming spacers even pay taxes? I basically want to have a character that avoids paying money to others. We're talking anything from avoiding paying docking fees to tax evasion.

What I'm asking you guys is vague, but what branches of the Imperial Government deal with the collection of money, and how can I avoid paying them cuts of my hard-earned credits?

P.S. Unscrupulous ways of acquiring credits are more than welcome!

Credits take many forms in Star Wars. From physical "coins" or bars that are by they very nature hard, but not impossible to track, to digital sticks (think credit cards) that are directly linked to a persons Banking Clan account,

In the timeline of the classic trilogy the Banking Clan is exclusively under Imperial Control, so whenever you would make a digital payment, wich is more likely the case in large purchases, the Empire could potentially know about it.

One obviously doesn't require an account in the Bankin Clan, but depending on the circumstances it might be difficult to get paid or to pay without one, especially in official and legal businesses. (Like an imperial controlled starport for example, or if you wanna buy or sell anything big in the vicinity of the core worlds.)

The kind of credits used in my game is usually arbitrary, unless it fits the narrative if I were to say: "Receiving this big unspecified payment onto you account for selling drugs might throw up some questions" - or something like that.

In a campaign were tracking assets is in the focus from time to time you should work closely with your GM and keep exact record of all things credits.

Things like:

• Account Balance and funds.
• Availabilty of physical credits
• Liquid capital
• Investments in businesses

Of course in the long run you have to have money to make money.

Check out this thread to learn more about how being rich as a player doesn't need to ruin you game:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/216727-players-and-the-perpetual-poverty-problem/

This might be especially interesting to your GM as he may or may not be afraid to bring your characters ambitions to it's full potential.

Also this thread for a short discussion on credits in general: https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/201143-credits-electronic-or-chips/?hl=credits

As a last note:

Mechanically you might be interested in a Credit Cleaner for the long run, As it is pretty impractical to haul hunderds of thousands of credits (or even millions) in phyiscal form.

Wich also means that money could easily be lost, either through capture or destruction of the ship maybe.

The Credit Cleaner can be found in the Lords of Nal Hutta sourcebook:

"Sophisticated Datapad incorporating complex encryption codes and logarithms,[...]. Once so laundered, the funds are incredibly difficult to trace[...]"

Difficulty 5 Computers check to track "cleaned" credits.

Hope this helps some.

Indeed. Thank you for attaching some links. It helps a lot to see other people's perspectives since there re no clear-cut ways to represent the Star Wars economy. As far as the different types of credits I imagine a shady car-salesman only accepting physical credits. Big legal purchases are likely represented with large digital transfers of credits. The weight of credit chips can probably be hand waved unless we are dealing with large amounts. Would anyone be able to provide the section of the Imperial Government that deals with money? I'm thinking of something similar to the IRS.

Have you ever read any of Karen Traviss' Clone Wars novels? They deal with a couple of Mandalorian instructors and the clone commandos that they trained during and immediately after the Clone Wars. The creme de la creme of clones are the Null ARCs - super-intelligent clones with "enhanced" DNA. The Nulls do a variety of illegal and quasi-legal things in the books; I'd recommend reading them and mining them for ideas.

One of them, N-10 "Jaing," developed a sophisticated virus that trawled through the banking system and siphoned a credit or two from trillions of accounts throughout the entire galaxy. Most beings either would not notice such a small discrepancy, or would write it off as a fee or other mistake too small to quibble about. This result in a vast sum of money for the clan to use as a war chest/slush fund. I wouldn't be inclined to let my players get away with anything quite so grand, but it's a great idea.

Hey, I think I read that! I thought it was called Office Space Wars!

Any of the typical methods of evading a taxing authority IRL would work equally as well in Star Wars....

Specifically:

• Working exclusively in cash
• Filtering all payments through a business
• Establishing a business in a non-taxed part of the Galaxy (Corp-Sec or Hutt Space come to mind)
• Charging things as expenses when they're really payments
• Bartering
• Payments in weapons
• Payments in spice
• etc.

Anything you can think of that wouldn't be tracked would be a good way to go about staying off the radar. However, probably the best way to go about doing it is through money-laundering and actually paying taxes on the incomes. If the Imps get their piece of the action, they're less likely to get riled up about your activities as long as the proper palms are greased. Same goes for the Hutts and megacorps. As long as there's something in it for the watchers as well, they tend to look the other way. This, of course, doesn't work on true believers, but, in that case, play to their biases and claim authority from higher up in their chain of command (with supporting documents -- forged of course).

The Homestead rules are a good start if the party is looking to actually make some real money and they need plausible deniability. That said, as IRL, the Imperial IRS doesn't tend to get involved with anything less than a hundred thousand or so in tax deficiency. It just doesn't make sense for them to spend the resources. Stay below that threshold and don't honk off a Moff, and you're likely good to go.