Hong Kong Protesters Pit Clever Software Against Tax Agency

Recent news and links of note:

• Tax resistance has played a role in the Hong Kong protest movement:

  Activists were temporarily able to exploit a loophole in the government’s tax payment system to undermine tax collections. [One Hong Kong activist] shares: “There is a tax resistance going on, so someone developed a ‘If I pay, you pay with us’ platform for taxpayers called PPS Automator.” Because the government pays $1 in transaction fees for each tax payment made through this portal, activists are urging taxpayers to pay in $1 increments, resulting in full loss of their tax revenue due to fees. The government eventually broke the tool by working with the payment provider to require users to manually submit their online payment once every ten attempts.

  Here’s a link to the PPS Automator program.
• I’ve rewritten my “Alice Turtle” appendix to Aristotle’s Politics into this long Medium essay: “Aristotle’s Guide to Anarchy”
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:
  • a recap of the recent NWTRCC national gathering
  • a report on the NWTRCC presence at the School of the Americas Watch and the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 trial
  • a note that the IRS apparently plans to ramp up its unannounced, in-person visits to recalcitrant tax scofflaws
  • and a personal account of such face-to-face meetings between IRS agents and a war tax resister by Paula Rogge
  Rogge shares some of her tactics for reducing the effectiveness of IRS reprisals (excerpt):

  The IRS has seized my car and checking account funds and has repeatedly levied my wages. My strategy has been to work several jobs, so that if a permanent levy were placed on my wages at one work-place, I could either reduce my hours at that job or quit and still have a backup job. When I’ve had the money, I’ve paid rent, health insurance, and food bills in advance.

• The details in the English-language press are vague, but apparently “[h]undreds of Lebanese business owners gathered in central Beirut protesting the delay in forming a new government and threatening a collective tax strike. Organisers said most private businesses have already been unable to pay taxes and are still getting slapped with penalties.”
• The human guerrilla war on traffic ticket robots continues its punishing swarm of attacks, lately in France, Switzerland, and Germany.