Is there some sort of trip wire in govt regulations that only looks at transactions $50K or above? I have heard a number of people mentioning this. Everyone assumes it is some way for Hunter to pay Joe his cut of whatever Hunter is up to.
Unofficially, yes. At least there was in the 1980s.
I had the misfortune to be working for a firm that came under federal DOJ scrutiny for contract fraud. They had both the DOJ Inspector General's office and the FBI working on it. The amount by which the company had probably cheated the federal government was probably in the hundreds of thousands, but the .gov's skilled forensic accountants could only prove an amount of about $48,000.
The lead prosecutor in the office heading up the investigation wanted to drop the case because it was under the $50,000 threshold. The woman who was actually handling the case overcame that when she reminded him that the client agency was ... the DOJ itself. In other words, it was okay to cheat any other agency out of $48,000, but the DOC got interested if you cheated the DOJ out of $48,000.