it's like the law no one knows about but
then they can come in and take your money based on this law. I definitely think it could happen too many many hard-working innocent businesses that
don't deserve to have their money taken away. The IRS seized over $68,000 from our checking account, they said they seized it on the civil forfeiture law
and based it on the fact that they thought I was structuring by the way I was
depositing our money in the bank. Until the day they came in I had no idea what structuring was and he showed me hard deposits on a piece of paper, and he says it was a consistent pattern of depositing under ten thousand dollars in
the bank My name is David Vocatura, my business is Vocatura's Bakery Incorporated. I'm one of the owners, it's a family business that started almost a hundred years ago by my grandfather in 1919, starting in
Rhode Island we moved it here to Connecticut, we been here almost 60 years. We supply bread to our retail store and other customers that use our product. On May 1st, 2013 there was like a regular morning here, two armed agents pulle d up
to our business and they were from the criminal division of the IRS and that
they had to ask me some questions and talk to me about our business. I said to them, maybe I should get a
lawyer and they said you don't need one step in the back, and then more and more agents just started coming in. Then my brother came back and they separated us with like
four or five agents a piece and they were asking us all kinds of questions about our
business. I felt like we were being held for two
hours against our will to stand there and talk to them with out being able to call anybody or do anything. At the end of it, they told us that they seized our money out of our checking account. $68,382, you know I wasn't aware of
the structuring law, I'm a law abiding citizen, I can't remember the last time I
got a speeding ticket. They've had our money since May 1st of 2013, and we've put in a claim to get it back based on the fact that we think we are
innocent and that with all the national attention on the structuring we thought
the case would just kind of phase out and then we didn't hear from them for eighteen months. Then all of a sudden our lawyer
called me up one day in February and said that the prosecutor sent over a
plea agreement, he was as shocked as anybody and said we're starting all over
again, we want you guys to plead unstructured. In addition to the $68,000+ that they already took from us, they wanted us to pay another
additional $160,000 in fines and plead to a felony
charge of structuring and you could be incarcerated for up to four years with
this charge . I discussed it with my brother and he
said that we just can't on any circumstances plead guilty to
this. This whole thing is crazy, what they're saying about us and our business is wrong, after three years of us waiting to get our money back. We teamed up with IJ because we want the IRS to give us our money back, and put an end to this practice once and for all.
