I’ve spent years of my life running L & M Convenience Mart, a small gas station, restaurant and convenience store in rural Fairmont, North Carolina. I managed to build up a little savings, but then, about a year ago, agents from the IRS came to the store and announced that they had seized everything in my bank account, totaling more than $107,000.

It took me 13 years to earn that money, but it took less than 13 seconds for them to take it away. But I fought back and my money was returned. Sadly, there are many others who are in similar situations. 

I hadn’t done anything wrong, and the IRS never said that I’d committed a crime—much less charged me with one. The reason they took my money was because my niece, who handles my banking, deposited cash receipts from the store in the bank in amounts under $10,000. They called that “structuring.”

A few months ago, when a Congressman asked the IRS Commissioner about my case, the Commissioner said “If that cases exists, then it’s not following the policy.” That’s because the IRS claims that it no longer uses a little-known legal tactic called “civil forfeiture” to take innocent Americans’ legally-earned money. 

Despite the IRS claiming they no longer use this tactic, we know that there are other cases like mine where people still have not had their money returned after it was taken from them. If the IRS and DOJ wouldn’t seize money under their new structuring policies, they shouldn’t keep it either. Stop using civil forfeiture and give back the money that you took from innocent Americans accused of nothing more than cash transactions under $10,000.

So I’ve teamed up with the Institute for Justice to fight the IRS and put an end to the illegal practice of using civil forfeiture to seize and keep millions of dollars from innocent Americans. I’m in this fight because I believe that Americans have a right to be free from arbitrary and unlawful seizure of their private property.