BY TANNER ANDREWS

A big chain bank tells me that they are cracking down on night deposits. People with accounts there are no longer allowed to drop deposits in the overnight slot.

Well, I had always thought that a crackdown was intended to respond to a problem. Having customers deposit money is pretty much the exact opposite of a problem. Rather, it is the thing that banks want to encourage.

It is therefore a mystery why they would want to crack down on deposits. Yet the bank tells me they are doing so. No announcement, no explanation, just a phone call saying that they no longer want deposits at night.

Oops, that was actually only for people. Companies are free to deposit at night, and as it happens, I run a company. Still, it is a separate business entity. Keeping it that way makes it easier to have good records for the accountants.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are people. For them, the bank no longer likes overnight drops. You would think it would be the other way.

With an overnight drop, the bank can handle it the next day. Depositors are not waiting in queues, so they can handle it at slack times. And there is always a paper trail. That is how overnight drops work.

Maybe I am being too sensible here. I suppose that if a bank wanted to hide something, they might hate the paper trail. I doubt they just enjoy watching people queue up in the lobby.

With modern regulation, I suppose there are a lot of things that a bank would want to hide. As a longtime reader of detective novels, however, I know that being seen hiding stuff makes people suspicious. You should not tell the first passing cop that “It was not me, and there are no bodies in my trunk.”

But there is another approach, sometimes used by more sophisticated crooks. We call it distraction, or the “red herring” technique. You put a fish in a trash can, then loudly announce that you know nothing of the odor. If it works, you can dump the bodies in the Everglades or launder the loot before the cops get wise.

Banks have sophisticated managers. I, therefore, guess that the reduction of the paper trail is intentional. And, we can at least guess what they are thinking — distract them and the regulators will never notice real problems!

— Andrews is a DeLand-area attorney and a longtime government critic. For purposes of the column, he finds it convenient that there is so much government to criticize.