On Wednesday, the day after an impeachment hearing for the IRS commissioner was held, the House Ways and Means committee held a hearing on protecting small business from IRS abuses.  The hearing largely focused on the IRS use of “structuring” laws to seize assets from many businesses who committed no crime but were merely engaged in businesses where significant amounts of cash were involved.  The structuring laws were passed as a means to track large amounts of cash and were intended to combat money laundering by criminals.  Many consumer advocates have complained about abuses of these laws by the IRS and also by numerous other law enforcement agencies.

For some basic information about structuring see here and here.  To date, I have not written much about structuring, but it is a problem that I hope congress will address.  Although the law was intended to allow law enforcement to track money laundering from criminal activities, it has been abused by IRS and numerous other law enforcement agencies with many instances of assets being seized from individuals and businesses simply because they deal with significant amounts of cash.