Farmer Refuses to Roll, Rips Lid Off IRS Behavior

Strapped with pistols and carrying government IDs, two Treasury agents walked onto a Maryland farm on a cold winter morning in 2012, and asked for the owner—Randy Sowers. It was a blur of badges and questions, but Sowers’ four-year legal nightmare was only just beginning. “My story could belong to any farmer or business owner,” Sowers says. “People have almost no idea what the feds will do when they want to hurt you. What kind of power-hungry bureaucrats do we have when guilt or innocence plays no role in the system?” Sowers was caught in the hooks of a law intended to capture crime lords and money launderers, and tagged with a bank deposit breach—a paperwork infraction with a sledgehammer penalty. Although the Frederick County producer wasn’t suspected of drug dealing, tax evasion, or criminal enterprise, Internal Revenue Service investigators wedged Sowers into a legal vise with almost no chance of escape. Sowers’ wife had made a series of bank deposits—all less than $10,000 cash and gleaned from farmers’ markets—and in response, IRS was baying for proverbial blood. “They seized almost $70,000 of our money, had us scared and thinking we were going to prison, and maybe losing all we’d worked for,” Sowers explains. “Roll over and shut up—that’s the game I was supposed to play.”...MORE

This is quite an article. Please read on about the Sowers' story, and as the author points out, this was not an isolated incident:

...IRS grabbed over $242 million in 2,500 suspected structuring cases from 2005-2012. Significantly, at least a third of the 2,500 cases were triggered by cash deposits below $10,000, and contained no other criminal allegations.
The examples are not isolated:
—Terry Dehko, and daughter, Sandy, owned Schott’s Supermarket, outside Detroit, Mich., and made frequent sub-$10,000 deposits from the store registers to a bank account, partly because their insurance policy only covered losses up to $10,000. In January 2013, IRS and DOJ drained the Dehko account—$35,000-plus.
—Calvin Taylor, and wife, Debora, grew sweet corn and raised poultry at C.W. Taylor Farms in Preston, Md., on the Eastern Shore, and operated multiple farm stands. In 2013, IRS plucked $90,175 from the Taylors’ business account, due to structuring.
—Jeff Hirsch owned Bi-County Distributors in Long Island, N.Y., and provided goods to convenience stores—a cash intensive business. Hirsch took an accountant’s advice and kept bank deposits below $10,000, in order to avoid paperwork. In March 2012, IRS grabbed $446,651 of Hirsch’s money.
—Carole Hinders had roughly $33,000 seized by IRS in 2014. She owned a small, cash-only restaurant in Spirit Lake, Iowa, and caught IRS attention after making sub-$10,000 deposits.

A 2017 Treasury Inspector General report found that in 91% of the cases audited, they“did not find evidence that the structured funds came from an illegal source or involved any other illegal activity.”