So, you’re sitting on millions of dollars’ worth of confiscated property. You want to give your workers a raise, but federal rules bar you from using seized assets to fund salaries. What’s an attorney general to do?

Well, if you’re Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, you turn to a strange source for the solution: the very U.S. Justice Department officials who are responsible for enforcing the rules you want to skirt.

They told Herring he could use the funds to cover routine costs “so long as your overall budget does not decrease.” Herring promptly started using seized funds to cover operational expenses like vehicle maintenance and rent payments — and then diverted funds that normally would have paid those bills into hefty salary hikes — up to $15,000 each for 64 attorneys.

Now that these higher salary costs are “baked in,” one of three things will have to happen: the legislature will have to increase Herring’s budget; there will have to be cutbacks elsewhere in Herring’s department; or law enforcement authorities will have to maintain or increase the level of forfeitures they obtain.

That last option is the scariest. Civil forfeiture funds are derived from the seizure of property. In most cases these seizures are entirely above board; they target the proceeds of crimes and the property used to commit them.

Often, however, property is confiscated on the basis of “suspicion,” with little or no actual evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of the property owner. And when that happens, there are precious few due process protections to prevent innocent people from losing their homes, cars and life savings.

In Virginia and at the federal level, owners are required essentially to prove innocence to get their property back. That is no sure thing. The difficulty of winning, combined with the cost of hiring a lawyer (which may exceed the value of what was taken), prompts many innocent people to simply give up. Others choose to fend for themselves in a labyrinthine forfeiture system — one that few attorneys fully understand.

Law enforcement organizations, meanwhile, have a powerful incentive to pursue forfeiture cases. Virginia laws let them keep the proceeds of successful forfeitures and spend it as they see fit.

Virginia’s authorities can also partner with federal law enforcement agencies and get up to 80 percent of any forfeiture revenues resulting from the joint investigations. Both Justice and Treasury departments operate these so-called Equitable Sharing programs. Since 2000 they have disbursed more than $185 million to Virginia law enforcement groups.

Federal rules require this money to be spent exclusively by law enforcement organizations for law enforcement purposes. Local and state legislators have no say in how these funds are spent.

There is a very good reason to prohibit using forfeiture funds to pay salaries: Leaving law enforcement officials to rely on property seizures for their very livelihoods invites corruption and abuse. It leads officials to treat forfeiture as a revenue source rather than a law enforcement tool. In such a system, how can the public ever assume that a sheriff or prosecutor is disinterested and impartial in the use of such a powerful tool?

Fortunately, Virginia lawmakers have taken notice. State senators recently proposed slashing Herring’s budget by a $500,000 — a move clearly intended to signal that they are watching his office closely.

But while the message is powerful, so is a potential unintended consequence: As long as law enforcement can use forfeiture funds to self-finance, any budget holes the legislature creates can simply be filled by increasing property seizures and forfeitures.

Since forfeiture funds may be spent entirely at the discretion of law enforcement officials, the end result of this action is not greater legislative control, but a weakening of it.

A better way would be to enact comprehensive forfeiture reform. State lawmakers took a long first step down this path last year, by raising the burden of proof in forfeiture cases to “clear and convincing evidence.” Now they should tackle forfeiture’s financial incentives. State law should prohibit the receipt of federal equitable sharing funds, and all other forfeiture proceeds should go to the state treasury, to be expended through the normal political process.

States like New Mexico, California and Nebraska have already taken these steps. They have demonstrated that public safety does not depend on the ability of law enforcement groups to self-finance via civil asset forfeiture. In the process, they have strengthened community trust in their police and prosecutors. It is time for Virginia to join them.