2/13/15 - The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is responsible for making sure people pay their taxes. As such, the IRS has many procedures they follow to uphold federal laws. Unfortunately, some of these procedures are flawed in that they can lead to unfair treatment of law-abiding taxpayers. In a recent Los Angeles Times article, the process by which the IRS deals with a practice called “structuring” is addressed.
Under federal law, all bank transactions over $10,000 have to be reported to the IRS. This law is meant to help federal officials catch drug dealers and money launderers. However, it is possible to avoid reporting all transactions to the IRS through “structuring,” by which large deposits are split up in such a way that less than $10,000 is deposited at any given time. The reason structuring is illegal is the assumption that the only people who would need to hide their income from the IRS are those earning money through illegal avenues. It is this practice on which the IRS has been cracking down in past years.
If a trend in your financial history shows many such deposits, which seemingly correspond to a structuring scheme, the IRS has the authority to seize your accounts, with no charges filed, for years on end in some situations. It hardly seems fair.
According to IRS Commissioner, John Koskinen, 60% of the 200 or so cases per year are not pursued by the owners of the seized accounts. This leads many to conclude that those individuals were in fact involved in illegal money practices, which could show that the practice is successful in some respects. But, what about the other 40%?
The problem with the current system is that the IRS doesn't need any proof. They don't have to know that the account holder is doing anything illegal. They just have to see that many deposits of less than $10,000 have been made in any given account. In many cases, there is very little for the law-abiding account-holder to do in response, to try to get their money back.
Some deposit smaller amounts into their accounts so as to not carry around large amounts of money between their place of business and the bank. Others simply make deposits at given times, and happen to deposit less than $10,000 at any given time. No matter what the reason, under current IRS practice, accounts can be seized under mere suspicions of possible wrongdoing. Some victims of the system eventually get their money back, but not after plenty of wasted time, stress, and legal fees.
Although the current way in which structuring is addressed has its major flaws, Koskinen assures the public that changes will be made. Congress and the IRS are working together to make sure that taxpayers are treated fairly, and to make sure that accounts will no longer be seized as long as the money in those accounts was earned legally. Although the changes may take some time to fully come to bear, it appears that when these changes are complete, the IRS will have lost some of its ability to seize money without reasonable cause.
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