Tax resistance links from hither and yon:
- Jacqui Germain penned an article on Economic Disobedience (What Is It and How Does It Work?) for Teen Vogue. It concludes with a few paragraphs on war tax resistance.
- The tax filing deadline came and went in the United States. Now that fewer people are filing last-minute paper returns, this is less of a spectacle than it once was, but war tax resisters still like to mark the occasion as a sort of ceremonial holiday. For example, in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley Taxes for Peace group redirected taxes from the government to useful groups. The People’s Life Fund in California also redirected $61,000 of would-be tax dollars to better causes.
- The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration issued yet another report. According to them, the IRS still had about four and a half million unprocessed paper tax returns to get through as of , only a couple hundred thousand less than they started the year with, while meanwhile half a million new returns had come in and hadn’t been processed. The agency had a goal of hiring 5,473 new submission processing employees to cope with this, but as of , they’d managed to onboard only 521.
- The IRS destroyed thirty million “information return” documents without processing them when the agency realized it would never catch up to the backlog in time to upgrade its systems for the next tax season. Information return documents are things like W-2s and 1099s that document sources of income. The agency relies on such returns to cross-check what taxpayers reveal on their income tax returns. The upshot of this is that for millions of taxpayers, if they did not reveal certain sources of income on their returns, the IRS is likely none the wiser about it. The decision has gotten scathing reviews, particularly from accountants who painstakingly generate and file these returns.
- In response to repeated massacres in Djugu, activists in Ituri have launched a 15-day hartal and a tax strike.
- The human struggle against the robot traffic ticket cameras continues, with the machines getting the worst of it in New Zealand, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium in recent weeks.
