Last week, the Senate very quietly passed the Taxpayer First Act, H.R. 3151. The bill, which now heads to President Donald Trump’s desk for his signature, seeks to improve customer service and better assist taxpayer appeals. The bill included other provisions, however, that seek to rein in the Internal Revenue Services abuse of civil asset forfeiture laws.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has a long, well-documented history of abusing federal forfeiture laws. They seize assets from innocent Americans on the mere suspicion of malfeasance. If the IRS believes a citizen is structuring deposits to avoid reporting requirements, the agency can seize your money. Administrative reforms were made in 2015 to roll back some abuses, but there is still much work to be done.

Americans often hear from radical leftists that “the rich need to pay their fair share” of income taxes. The rhetoric is hard to avoid. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) based partly based his failed 2016 presidential campaign on soaking the wealthy in taxes, and House and Senate Democrats railed against the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, H.R. 1, because it lowered tax rates across the board, including on higher-income earners.

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee want to know why the Department of Justice (DOJ) has denied petitions by Americans whose money was seized by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The seized money was subject to federal civil asset forfeiture hearings in which the individual from whom the money was taken had to prove that it wasn’t connected to any wrongdoing.

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.