{"id":28545,"date":"2014-11-06T00:02:32","date_gmt":"2014-11-06T05:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28545"},"modified":"2014-11-05T22:03:53","modified_gmt":"2014-11-06T03:03:53","slug":"asset-forfeiture-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/11\/06\/asset-forfeiture-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Asset forfeiture again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the <em>Washington Post<\/em> last month, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/volokh-conspiracy\/wp\/2014\/10\/26\/the-too-long-arm-of-the-law-contd\/\" target=\"_blank\">David Post<\/a> discussed the issue of asset forfeiture:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The heat is slowly turning up on the government\u2019s use of civil asset forfeiture procedures to extort money out of innocent individuals without the messy need to actually show that they did anything wrong or wrongful. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/volokh-conspiracy\/wp\/2014\/10\/11\/john-oliver-strikes-again\/\" target=\"_blank\">I blogged about this a couple of weeks ago<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/10\/26\/us\/law-lets-irs-seize-accounts-on-suspicion-no-crime-required.html\" target=\"_blank\">today\u2019s <em>New York Times <\/em>has a front page article detailing another wrinkle in the civil forfeiture scam<\/a>: seizures of funds deposited in violation of the \u201canti-structuring\u201d provisions of the federal code.<\/p>\n<p>As you probably know, banks have an obligation to report all cash transactions of more than $10,000 to the federal government. What you may not know is that it is a federal crime to \u201cstructure a transaction,\u201d including by \u201cbreaking down a single sum of currency exceeding $ 10,000 into smaller sums, &#8230; \u201cfor the purpose of evading the [reporting] requirement.\u201d The reporting requirement itself is designed to alert the government to possibly suspicious transactions involving proceeds from money laundering, or drugs or gambling or other cash-intensive activities. But the statute makes the evasion itself a crime \u2014 even if the money was derived from perfectly lawful activities, and even if the \u201cpurpose of evading the reporting requirement\u201d is a perfectly benign one. And to make matters much worse, the IRS doesn\u2019t even have to charge you with the crime of \u201cstructuring\u201d in order to seize the proceeds of the transaction under civil asset forfeiture laws, and the <em>Times<\/em> article details growing use of this procedure to take and keep money belonging to innocent individuals who are never even charged with the crime at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the Washington Post last month, David Post discussed the issue of asset forfeiture: The heat is slowly turning up on the government\u2019s use of civil asset forfeiture procedures to extort money out of innocent individuals without the messy need to actually show that they did anything wrong or wrongful. I blogged about this a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,13],"tags":[436,996],"class_list":["post-28545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-banking","tag-civilforfeiture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7qp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28545"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28547,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28545\/revisions\/28547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}