How to check up on second-hand stores

As I read the Oregonian‘s series on second-hand stores last week the thought occurred to me that a modest regulation could discourage disreputable operators from serving as fences of stolen property.  Suppose the city required all operators of second-hand stores to pay for goods by check, made payable to a specific person (no checks to "cash" or "bearer" allowed"), to list on the store’s copy the items purchased, and then to staple a copy of the seller’s driver’s license to the store’s copy of the check?  If maintaining a paper trail of where money goes is supposed to help us find and catch terrorists, then a simpler version of the same technique should work to deter petty theft.