It was not uncommon for David Vocatura or other family members to make cash deposits at their bank – many customers at Vocatura’s Bakery, a nearly 100-year-old community institution, paid cash.
But it was those deposits in amounts under $10,000 that drew the attention of the Internal Revenue Service three years ago and put the family through legal hell – and, despite some good news this week, that hell is not over.
The 2013 IRS raid on the Norwich, Connecticut, family business resulted in the agency seizing $68,000 from the Vocaturas’ bank account under civil asset-forfeiture procedures. For three years the IRS pressured David and his brother to plead guilty to criminal charges of “structuring” bank deposits and to agree to surrender the money. They refused.
In retaliation for their refusal, the agency then launched a criminal tax investigation of their business, requiring them to account for nearly every financial transaction over an eight-year-period. That’s when the Vocatura’s took the IRS to court.
Grover Norquist takes down the IRS in “End the IRS Before It Ends Us.”
On Tuesday, just hours after Vocatura’s Bakery and the Institute for Justice sued the IRS to get the money back, the IRS announced it would return all of the money but is continuing with its retaliatory tax investigation.