While I was working my way through the Spanish Handbook of Economic Disobedience and trying my hand at some amateur translation, interesting links were accumulating in my bookmarks. I’ll share some of these today:
- A site called CommunityCurrenciesLaw.org has assembled a good collection of legal information about alternative currencies, including a page about the tax treatment of barter, swapping, and gifts.
- I’ve started a Twitter feed (@99Tactics) for my upcoming book, 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns. I’ll post updates there about ongoing tax resistance campaigns around the world, about the upcoming book release, and about workshops and other events associated with the book.
- The erosion of the IRS budget and the expansion of its responsibilities has led to a drop in revenue from its collections/enforcement branch.
“Diminished enforcement could also affect voluntary compliance over time,” according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report that revealed the numbers.
Over the , enforcement revenue has dropped by 13% and the number of agency personnel working on enforcement has dropped by 14%. Those effects took place before this year’s sequester, which forced furlough days and cancellations of bonuses on IRS employees, and also before the morale-sapping “IRS Scandals” that have made the news in recent months. They also preceded, of course, the so-called “government shutdown” which will also put most IRS enforcement on hold.The IRS has shed about 8,000 jobs , the report said. It comes as the IRS is taking on big new responsibilities implementing President Barack Obama’s new health care law, with congressional Republicans wanting to cut the agency’s budget even more.
- Speaking of IRS scandals, the Republican politicians who have been piling-on to every whiff of agency impropriety went strangely silent when it was recently revealed that companies seeking rulings from the agency on their tax dodges of choice have been able to choose which IRS attorneys will process their requests — in essence, allowing them to choose the judge in their own cases.
- Dublin household and water charge strikers are fighting back against government attempts to install water meters that would enforce the new tax. This video demonstrates how resisters have poured concrete blocks to prevent the installation of the meters:
- War tax resister Ed Hedemann appeared on Breaking The Set to explain “how Americans can stop financially supporting the military industrial complex by withholding taxes”:
