
Yesterday Donald Trump signed a law that forbids the IRS to seize the bank accounts of business owners based on nothing more than the allegation that they "structured" their deposits or withdrawals to evade federal reporting requirements. That kind of odious money grab—which, like other forms of civil forfeiture, did not require criminal charges, let alone a conviction—provoked bipartisan outrage in Congress after it was publicized by the Institute for Justice, the libertarian public interest law firm.
Since 1970 the humorously named Bank Secrecy Act has required financial institutions to report transactions involving $10,000 or more to the Treasury Department, because such large sums of cash are obviously suspicious. You know what else is suspicious? Transactions involving less than $10,000, because they suggest an attempt to evade the government's reporting requirement, which has been a federal crime, known as "structuring," since 1986.