Can you pay a restaurant bill in pennies? Say you eat at a restaurant, and after you are finished, the waiter brings you your bill. Is the restaurant legally obligated to accept pennies as payment regardless of the amount? (Of course, I am assuming no explicit arrangements regarding this have been made beforehand.)
It doesn't even have to be pennies. Any cash denomination is open to discretion. The Federal Reserve tells us "There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. "
If you want to protect yourself or any property interests you may have in this circumstance you have to talk to a lawyer. You cannot get (or trust) legal advice from the internet. I will, however, make the following personal observations: I only provide a W-9 to people who are paying me money, and who request it as a condition of paying me. I don't know of a legal requirement to supply it after the fact. However, not providing it to someone who did pay you more than $600 in a tax year could certainly make it difficult for them to comply with their tax filing obligations. I do not sign any agreements, assignments, or contracts, without what I consider to be fair consideration. E.g., if on leaving a job (as has happened) I am asked by a former employer to sign something that I am not already obligated to sign due to some prior contract, then I negotiate what is commonly called a "severance package." They pay me and/or extend benefits, and I sign something that limits their liability.
Sure You run a restaurant employing relatives and cronies and you scrupulously pay them and their taxes. Say $500k. That is clean money. You take some money from running the restaurant but not enough to cover costs. Say $200k. However, you declare that your revenues were actually $800k with the difference being $600k of dirty money which “customers” paid in cash. You pay your taxes on your $300k profit and now have nice clean legitimate money. Now, what legitimate businesses typically do is underreport their cash income to minimise taxes but a laundering front overreports and pays too much tax to clean the money. For every $1 of dirty money going in you only get 70c out (or whatever depending on local taxes) but that money is clean.
In my opinion, your question is no different from "If I steal money from a bank to pay off my credit card in the same bank, can I be held liable for stealing". I think the obvious answer is yes for both your question and the modified one, for exactly the same reason.
Rather than deciding that a restaurant is a convenience store, the restaurant owner can, following the text that you quoted (&quot;unless the consumer specifically requests the single-use plastic straw&quot;), wait for the customer to request a straw, in which case they can give the customer a straw. If a restaurant owner decides to declare that it is a convenience store and not a restaurant, there could be unintended consquences, since (for examples) a convenience store can't serve a glass of beer.
I don't know of any federal law that is violated. US labor law is generally favorable to employers, compared to many other countries, and gives employers a lot of freedom in setting policies and rules, The theory is that an employee who doesn't like it can go and work somewhere else, and an employer with unreasonable policies will eventually be unable to get people to work for them. In particular, it surprises some people that employers aren't legally obligated to reimburse travel expenses at all: The FSLA does not have any rules regarding an employer's obligation to reimburse an employee for business-related travel expenses. No federal law requires reimbursement. So it would be perfectly legal for the company to require employees to pay for all their own meals when traveling on business. Given this, I'd expect that the company would have pretty broad discretion to place conditions and restrictions on reimbursement, including what they will and won't pay for. If an employee had a disability or religious beliefs that required them to eat meat, and the company wouldn't grant them an exception, they might have a claim under the ADA or Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act respectively. But if it's just that they happen to prefer meat, I don't think there's a law to guarantee them such a right. Some states could have their own laws that might be violated, though I tend to doubt it. If you have a particular state in mind, please specify.
The problem with "as soon as possible" is that one could then say "Well, I've got a lot of bills, so it's not possible to pay you until Uncle Bill dies and I get my inheritance". A good contract leaves no doubt about who does what, when. A specific date is best, though if there is a certain amount of backing and forthing, "July 30" could be "tomorrow", and therefore "within 14 days of acceptance" would still identify a specific date -- provided that the date of acceptance is there in the contract. (It usually is, but doesn't absolutely have to be).
According to this Treasury Department web page refers the asker to the : ... Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," which states: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." I take this to mean that taxing authorities must accept cash in payment of taxes. it doesn't say anything about use of coins, say pennies, to pay large tax bills. I had heard that coins were legal tender only up to a limiting amount, but could not find any citation for this. Then I found this Snopes page which says that pennies and nickels were legal tender only up to 25 cents under the Coinage Acts of 1873 and 1879 but the Coinage Act of 1965 (31 U.S.C. 5103) removed this limit, and made all circulating US coins legal tender for any amount. I have not found any source that seems to me reliable that contradicts this.