There's a massive difference between drawing the attention of the IRS because you're making just-under-$10k transactions on a regular basis (which, first of all, requires you to even have $10k in a non-retirement account, which already puts you above most people), and happening to drive through a jurisdiction where the police like stealing from people, and having them confiscate your car and the contents of your wallet.

Factually, yes seizing/forfeiting a bank account is different than cash. You are correct, they are two different things.

Whether one is easier than the other depends on circumstances. Domestic bank accounts are easily found. Those who may want to seize them quite likely work in an office, down the street from a judge who will rubber-stamp if needed.

Seizing cash requires a lot more:

0) Willingness to engage in policing in the field rather than cowardly slob sitting in office searching for new victims.

1) Determining the person actually has the cash

2) Knowing where the cash is

3) Employing force against any persons resisting the seizure, and risking that person may employ self defense.

Seizing a bank account usually requires none of those above. You know where the cash is (the bank), the bank will tell you how much they have, and the bank employees aren't going to resist the seizure from the police. For all we know someone could bury cash somewhere and not even a metal detector is going to pick that up.

So you're correct. To me, the massive difference is a bank account seizure is just how much easier it is to seize. (and to most people, just how much more devastating it is)

>happening to drive through a jurisdiction where the police like stealing from people, and having them confiscate your car and the contents of your wallet.

It's worth noting it usually goes more along the lines of police asking someone if they have a "large amount of currency" and the person being dumb enough to answer in the affirmative and then being dumb enough to consent to a search. They have to ask a lot of people too to even get that far, so not exactly a fast or easy process. Sure there are all sorts of other scenarios, but seizing cash in the field randomly like this is a lot more work than some IRS agent sitting in their office, running some VBA script to find someone in a few seconds who had a couple consecutive transaction that ran above a sum of 10k.

There's more that's different to it than that, though.

Just as another couple examples:

- Civil asset forfeiture is something that local police departments around the country can do to people within their jurisdiction. Seizing a bank account is something only the IRS can do—and the IRS is known to be woefully understaffed and under-resourced at the moment.

- As I understand it, when the IRS seizes a bank account, that money doesn't go to the IRS; I believe it goes into some more general fund, but I'm afraid I'm not well-informed about that. Civil asset forfeitures go, in most cases, directly to the police department that seized them. That makes the incentives completely different. (Even if I'm wrong, and assets seized by the IRS go into its budget, that still doesn't create the same kind of incentive that we see with these police departments, given the number of stories of officers in these small podunk towns driving extremely expensive cars off the job and buying extremely fancy police toys on the job with the seized money. The IRS, being a much more supervised federal government department, is going to have to account much more clearly for its expenditures.)