According to The Dallas Morning News, an elderly Thai couple and their bridal shop were targeted by the IRS under the Obama Administration in March 2015. They were forced out of business despite never being formally accused by the federal government of violating any laws.
Mii’s Bridal & Tuxedo, in Garland, Texas, owned by Tony Thangsongcharoen, 68, and his wife, Somnuek Thangsongcharoen, 72, was seized by IRS agents, prompting the Thai couple to file a lawsuit against the federal government in March for more than $1.8 million.
The Thangsongcharoens started their business in 1983 after emigrating to the United States. An IRS agent got authorization for the seizure from a U.S. district court. The owners’ lawsuit alleges that IRS agents arriving at the store informed the owners they had to cough up a $10,000 check within two hours or their roughly 1,600 “designer” gowns, worth more than $615,000, would be sold.
The IRS claims it has the right to act swiftly if it decides the goods seized could “perish or waste” or lose their value, or if storing the property would cost the IRS “great expense.” This was justification for not posting advance public notice of the Mii’s sale or waiting at least 10 days before selling the goods, the usual procedure.
The sale yielded roughly $17,000, which didn’t measure up to the roughly $31,400 in tax debt alleged by the government. The lawsuit alleges, “The agents auctioned off, before their very eyes, the family’s entire life savings for pennies on the dollar.”
Anya Bidwell, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, told The Dallas Morning News that the IRS has a “history of aggressively interpreting federal laws to seize property,” adding, “No one in the United States should lose property without being convicted of a crime or without a proper due process hearing.”
The lawsuit alleges other improprieties during the sale: “The lead agent brought four children to join the armed agents and tag along during the entire process.”
The Thangsongcharoens claim they didn’t owe the IRS any taxes; the government claims the couple intentionally made cash deposits just under the $10,000 limit in 2005, 2008 and 2010.
The lawsuit claims that the IRS agents marked down the inventory to roughly $6,000 so they could claim it would cost more to store the goods than they were worth; that would amount to less than $4 per dress.
As The Blaze noted:
In 2015, the Institute for Justice, an organization that has actively fought against lenient IRS seizure policies, published a study showing from 2005 to 2012, the IRS took from people more than $43 million in 600 cases in which the people whose assets had been taken had not been suspected of any criminal activity except for having made deposits slightly below the $10,000 threshold.