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IRS Seizes Hundreds Of Perfectly Legal Bank Accounts, Refuses To Give Money Back
The Internal Revenue Service has been seizing bank accounts belonging to small businesses and individuals who regularly made deposits of less than $10,000, but broke no laws. And the government is refusing to return all the money taken.
The practice ‒ called civil asset forfeiture ‒ allows IRS agents to seize property they suspect of being tied to a crime, even if no charges are filed, and their agency is allowed to keep a share of whatever is forfeited, the New York Times reported. It’s designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking cash deposits under $10,000, which is the threshold for when banks are federally required to report activity to the IRS under the Bank Secrecy Act.
It is not illegal to deposit less than $10,000 in cash, unless it is specifically done to avoid triggering the federal reporting requirement, known as structuring. Thus, banks are required to report any suspicious transactions to authorities, including patterns of deposits below that threshold.
“Of course, these patterns are also exhibited by small businesses like bodegas and family restaurants whose cash-on-hand is only insured up to $10,000, and whose owners are wary of what would be lost in the case of a robbery or a fire,” the Examiner noted.
Carole Hinders, a victim of civil asset forfeiture, owns a cash-only Mexican restaurant in Iowa. Last year, the IRS seized her checking account ‒ and the nearly $33,000 in it. She told the Times she did not know of the federal reporting requirement for suspicious transactions, and that she thought she was doing everyone a favor by reducing their paperwork.
“My mom had told me if you keep your deposits under $10,000, the bank avoids paperwork,” she said. “I didn’t actually think it had anything to do with the I.R.S.”
And her bank wasn’t allowed to tell her that her habits could be reported to the government. If customers ask about structuring their deposits, banks are allowed to give them a federal pamphlet.“We’re not allowed to tell them anything,” JoLynn Van Steenwyk, the fraud and security manager for Hinders’ bank, told the Times.
Last year, banks filed more than 700,000 suspicious activity reports, according to the Times. The median amount seized by the IRS. was $34,000, according to an analysis by the Institute for Justice, while legal costs can easily mount to $20,000 or more, meaning most account owners can’t afford to fight the government for their money.
“They’re going after people who are really not criminals,” David Smith, a former federal prosecutor who is now a forfeiture expert and lawyer in Virginia, told the Times. “They’re middle-class citizens who have never had any trouble with the law.”
Rick Ungar wrote that the practice “amounts to nothing short of grand larceny on the part of the Internal Revenue Service” in an article for Forbes.
The Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 came about after a Supreme Court case,Ratzlaf v. US (510 US 135 (1994)), in which the government argued that because“structuring is not the kind of activity that an ordinary person would engage in innocently,” it was therefore “reasonable to hold a structurer responsible for evading the reporting requirements without the need to prove specific knowledge that such evasion is unlawful.” But the Court rejected that argument, citing the lawful actions of small businesses to reduce the risk of an IRS audit.
Congress, believing that the decision “would make it harder to find and to prosecute money launderers and drug dealers,” according to the Washington Post blog the Volokh Conspiracy. The legislature then removed the word “wilfully” from the previous law about civil asset forfeiture, “leaving us with the mess we now have.”
The Institute for Justice, a Washington-based public interest law firm that is seeking to reform civil forfeiture practices, analyzed structuring data from the IRS, which made 639 seizures in 2012, up from 114 in 2005, the Times reported. Only one in five was prosecuted as a criminal structuring case.
“Think about that— a full eighty percent of the bank accounts emptied by the IRS in 2012 involved completely innocent people and businesses,” Ungar wrote. “How is that not a criminal enterprise?”
Most victims of civil asset forfeiture settle with the government for only a small portion of what was seized from them.
Army Sgt. Jeff Cortazzo of Arlington, Va., wanted to deposit cash for his daughters’ college education, but wanted to avoid paying a second round of taxes on the money. He asked thebank teller what to do.
“She said: ‘Oh, that’s easy. You just have to deposit less than $10,000’,” he told the Times.
The government seized $66,000 from the sergeant; he lost $21,000 of his money in the settlement with the IRS. “As a result, the eldest of his three daughters had to delay college by a year,” the Times noted.
“The IRS ‘accidentally’ takes your money and when you ask for it back, they try to keep a portion of it,” Ungar wrote. “How does that not have the odor of extortion?”
For his part, Cortazzo would have done things differently if he’d known his account could have been seized. “I would have just plopped the whole thing in the account and been done with it,” he said.
The IRS announced in a written statement Thursday that it will “no longer pursue the seizure and forfeiture of funds associated solely with ‘legal source’ structuring cases unless there are exceptional circumstances justifying the seizure and forfeiture and the case has been approved at the director of field operations (D.F.O.) level.”
But Richard Weber, the chief of Criminal Investigation at the tax agency, noted in the statement that structuring is still a crime, regardless of source and that the new policy will not apply to past seizures.“The policy involving seizure and forfeiture in ‘illegal source’ structuring cases will remain the same,” he noted.
Source: RT
The article IRS Seizes Hundreds Of Perfectly Legal Bank Accounts, Refuses To Give Money Back published by TheSleuthJournal – Real News Without Synthetics
Source: http://www.thesleuthjournal.com/irs-seizes-hundreds-perfectly-legal-bank-accounts-refuses-give-money-back/
so when i deposit 60 bucks a week ..that’s under 10,000 dollars.. they can seize my account..
Yup
You MUST be selling POT!
When FDR started taking us off the gold standard in the 30′s, he sent the FBI in to take all gold from all safe deposit boxes in all banks nationwide. If you had gold in your safe deposit box, it was deemed ‘illegal’, and was confiscated without repayment. It was never returned.
‘The Republic’ has ALWAYS been a scam, and since the days after Andrew Jackson as President, it has ALWAYS been owned by the bankers. He was truly the last President that successfully stood up to them, and lived to tell about it.
let me explain you go to a casino
you make a deal for house chips
you win/lose
win you take home the prize money not the chips
the chips belong to the house not you they can legally be seized at any time and you have to fight in court to get any value back
federal reserve notes are chips
they can be seized at any time for any reason by agents for the bank
you have to fight the agent or the principal and try to get some value more federal reserve notes (chips)
that’s the only remedy the bench=bank can legally pay in an administrative proceeding they are not acting as judges because you agreed to the terms of payment earlier knowingly or not . so long sucker
You are poor therefore you must be a criminal simply because you do not qualify to pay the tax, I love the way the top 5% think.
They can print as much new credit (Debt) as they like to make the money worthless and seize digits from a computer but they will have a bit of a job to take my gold/silver coins and thats why its called real money.
Like Fracking its a desperate move by bankers to take any wealth from the people by raiding bank accounts and in the long term it will bite them on the bum but i guess they will try anything being so desperate.
Did i tell you that banks don’t want money when they can print it up from fresh air !
it’s your assets they are after when you cannot meet the interest payments on them loans and taking your money moves them closer to that goal but whats the value of something that might go up in flames before its had over by a good little boy.
Its a game bait and switch >
If you work for god=natural law=proper order=health,
you get just that.
If you depend on chance random disorder chaos you get disease.
Worship translates into work ship
That’s the original meaning .
working for health= holy
working for the random chance gamble =unholy=unhealthy
So for the first few months the casino was totally losing+every body that abandon the hard work of staying with nature =god. benefited and sang high praises to the wall street “money for nothing and chicks for free” was the cry.
which called many people to the city=trap and they sign on for the free money the trap was slowly sprung.
all knowledge of nature was lost and every one lost the health that could give them the energy to fight out of the trap fair and square.
so the need for bloody revolution became the easy way out.
but today with all the high technique/knowledge =technology on guarding almost all possible easy ways out.
You have to give it all up all you were working for and suffer till you get back to health =nature =4 forces truth =god
ill tell you it works as long as you dont go back to depending only on the casino gov
after all isn’t it a fact that the people that act as your mind because you find it comfortable create enemies so that you need them and if you dont go along they seize the chips you hold in trust
in god we trust my ass more like we build a house on sand screw trust we will just build another one
and when that house falls we build another but what about the kids screw that; dont you see im busy trying to put a roof over your head.? look at your selves.
give Cesar his chips and get your life back
nothing is free dont let the banks kill all of you.
be poor in chips and rich in health now that’s sustainable.
The irs needs to be exposed for who and what they are. They are not a federal agency any more than the Fed is. A Porto Rico trust, I have been told.
your governor is the pit boss for the casino
not a peep from him/her
If you really want to know what’s going on, get a strong magnifying glass and look at the signature line on your checks for your bank account! And than read about it and more about the IRS:
http://www.annavonreitz.com/index.html