On behalf of FreedomWorks’ activist community, I urge you to contact your representative and ask him or her to support the Preserving Taxpayers’ Rights Act, H.R. 3220, introduced by Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.). The bill would bring necessary reforms to allow taxpayers to resolve tax disputes with the IRS without being forced to litigate in court which is inefficient, expensive, and time consuming for taxpayers, the IRS, and the courts.

Civil asset forfeiture, a tool used by law enforcement to seize property from individuals because they have merely been accused of a crime, has gotten a lot more scrutiny in recent days due to its lack of oversight and abuse. What many may not know though is that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) also has the ability to seize property from businesses it is investigating. Fortunately, to address the abuses by the organization, Tax Policy Subcommittee Chairman Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) have introduced a bill to defend business owners from IRS forfeiture overreach.

The estate tax, applied to assets of someone when they die, represents a tiny portion of federal revenue. But for farms and businesses at risk of being caught by this death tax, the effects can be huge. If a business or farm is valuable enough to be ensnared by the estate tax, passing on this asset built and developed over a lifetime, or across generations, becomes extraordinarily difficult and costly, sometimes even impossible. But apparently the Internal Revenue Service does not think this situation is bad enough and has proposed new regulations which would make passing on a business to your children even more difficult.

The hardest part of drafting any new regulation is establishing a definition. In fact, most of the policy work is in the definition and there are alarmingly few policy considerations after something is defined as a covered entity. The definition of cryptocurrency has already proved problematic for regulators. Essentially, to commodities regulators, virtual currency is a commodity. For bank regulators, it is a bank. For securities regulators, it is a security. For those who regulate money transmitters, it is a money transmitter. For the purpose of property taxes, it is a property. Everyone wants a stake in the new world of virtual currency.