Edge of the Financial Cliff
Abolish the agency, ASAP:
The latest installment of frightfully unacceptable government behavior involves a law created in 2000—the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000—granting the IRS the power to seize the bank accounts of those suspected to be terrorists, drug dealers or engaged in other criminal activity, even when no charges have been filed and no convictions achieved.
The idea behind the law was to require banks to alert federal authorities to patterns of bank deposits that remain slightly below the $10,000 amount that has long triggered a bank’s responsibility to report deposits to the feds.
Knowing that bad guys are sufficiently savvy to avoid detection of large deposits by making frequent bank drops below the amount triggering reporting, the law empowers the IRS to look for patterns of frequent deposits—often made over the course of a day—that appear designed to avoid detection.
. . .
The New York Times reports that there were 114 of these seizures in 2005. However, in 2012, the last statistics available, the number had grown to 639 seizures.
It get’s worse. Of the 639 seizures in 2012, only twenty percent of these seizures turned out to involve cases where criminal charges were ever pursued.
Think about that— a full eighty percent of the bank accounts emptied by the IRS in 2012 involved completely innocent people and businesses.
How is that not a criminal enterprise?
