Problems With Forfeiture Data

The forfeiture data collected for this report show forfeiture is extensive, cash-centric, and typically conducted through civil, not criminal, forfeiture procedures. Still, forfeiture reporting remains remarkably weak. At the federal level, while the DOJ regularly posts its forfeiture database, called the Consolidated Asset Tracking System, online, annual audits have identified “significant” deficiencies, and CATS appears to suffer from significant reporting lags. ¹  The Treasury is even less transparent. It does not make its database available online—the Institute for Justice secured a one-time release of data through 2016 by filing a freedom-of-information lawsuit—and instead publishes reports providing only topline numbers with little detail.

At the state level, forfeiture reporting is particularly weak, as data are often incomplete, inaccurate, or internally inconsistent. (See also “Forfeiture Transparency and Accountability: A Nationwide Necessity.”) Georgia provides a striking example of incomplete reporting: A recent review found that, between 2016 and 2018, 130 required reports were missing altogether and 30% were incomplete in some way—despite a state law imposing penalties for failure to report. ²  Our data are also rife with examples of incomplete reporting. In California, about a quarter of district attorney’s offices do not report their data annually. ³  In other states, certain data are simply missing: For example, for 84% of properties in Nebraska and 49% in New Jersey, no proceeding type is recorded. And in still other states, such as Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia, only seizures are reported annually, making it impossible to know how many properties were ultimately forfeited. ⁴

Data that are reported often contain inaccuracies, likely due to poor record keeping. IJ’s study of Indiana forfeiture cases found that roughly 30% of forfeiture cases from 2016 to 2021 were not reported at all, and among a random sample of reported cases, about two-thirds contained at least one reporting error. ⁵  An audit of Washington’s King County Sheriff’s Office discovered most forfeiture records were maintained in paper folders and electronic records were often incomplete, making it impossible to know how many assets were seized, let alone their value or other important details. ⁶

Finally, reported data are often inconsistent, as jurisdictions or agencies fill in state forms in different ways. In Florida, for example, agencies frequently entered the same information—the amount of cash secured via settlement—in entirely different fields, requiring extensive manual cleanup to make the data useful. At other times, agencies answer the same question differently, as in Missouri where some agencies filled in a field for the type of criminal charges associated with a forfeiture by listing the charges, while some reported yes or no, others provided a date, and still others left it blank.

Nearly every state’s forfeiture data suffer from at least one of these problems, and this is a key reason important questions like whether owners filed claims or whether forfeitures were civil or criminal are answerable for only a handful of states. It also suggests forfeiture’s scope is larger, potentially substantially larger, than we report here.