A Study from Tax Ethics Researcher Robert McGee

McGee’s paper “Is it Unethical to Evade Taxes in an Evil or Corrupt State?” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

Robert W. McGee has written a paper titled The Ethics of Tax Evasion: A Survey of International Business Academics which is available on-line. From the Abstract:

In , Martin Crowe, a Catholic priest, wrote a doctoral dissertation titled The Moral Obligation of Paying Just Taxes. His dissertation summarized and analyzed 500 years of theological and philosophical debate on this topic, much of which took place in Latin. Since Crowe’s dissertation, not much has been written on the topic of tax evasion from an ethical perspective, with a few exceptions. In , a few articles were published on the ethics of tax evasion in the Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy. An edited book on this topic was published in . ¶ The present paper summarizes, updates and expands on Crowe’s work.

NWTRCC is going to try to light a fire under the war tax resistance movement this week:

The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC) has scheduled a press conference at , at 239 Thompson St. (Judson Memorial Church) in Manhattan to announce plans to escalate opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the nonpayment of taxes to the IRS.

Some of the speakers have either gone to prison or are about to be jailed rather than violate their conscience by paying taxes that would contribute to killing. Among those speaking at the press conference will be Karl Meyer (Chicago, IL), Susan Quinlan (Berkeley, CA), Lee Gough (Brooklyn, NY), Joe Donato (Mays Landing, NJ), and Daniel Woodham (Greensboro, NC).

There’s a brief, paint-by-numbers overview of the American war tax resistance movement in the latest Utne. Alas, it begins:

Cut the funding and the war stops, right? That’s the line of reasoning taken by a growing number of peace activists, and it’s a tactic with a lot of potential. But actually doing it is harder than it looks.

That’s just about the opposite of the lede I would have used. I would have emphasized how tax resistance is much easier than it looks.