I.R.S. Woes and Other News for American Tax Resisters

And now, a bit of domestic tax resistance news:

• Long-time war tax resister Karen Marysdaughter explores the links between war tax resistance and environmental activism.
• While the IRS has been complaining that budget cuts and corresponding cuts to collection personnel will cause revenue from collections to fall, the latest stats aren’t showing much of a correlation.
• There’s a new semiannual Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report out. It’s a real page-turner, but if you don’t have the time, here are a couple of highlights:
  • The report counts 3,300 people who have been fooled by phony IRS agents who call them up to threaten them about a tax debt and get them to send money to the scammers. The scam has netted something like $16.8 million. These figures may be understating the problem, as some people who got fooled probably haven’t spoken up about it.
  • The IRS rehired 141 former employees who had had “prior substantiated conduct or performance issues” “including [such issues as] willfully failed to file their tax returns… unauthorized access to taxpayer information, leave abuse, falsification of official forms, unacceptable performance, misuse of IRS property, and off-duty misconduct.” And nearly 20 percent of these also had such issues filed against them after having been rehired. Most curious to me is that when the IRS had this pointed out to them, their response was to say that they see no reason to change their hiring practices.
• Erica Weiland reflects on the NWTRCC presence at the recent Social Forum in San Jose, California.
• I still think the whole IRS scandal involving the screening of Tea Party groups that were trying to game the nonprofit system to engage in electioneering was largely bullshit. But whether from arrogance or incompetence or from more conniving motives, the agency is sure acting like it’s covering up something. Bullshit or not, the agency is doing as much as its enemies to keep the scandal alive.
• Oh yeah, and the IRS penned $19 million in contracts with contractors who haven’t paid their taxes. That’s against the law… not the not-paying-taxes part, which you already knew, but the doing business with tax-scofflaw companies part. Not that anyone at the agency will get in trouble for it.

From the Chicago Daily Tribune of 15 July 1896:

Denver Men Resist Tax Collection

Hold a Secret Meeting and Agree to Stand Together

Raising of Assessment Causes Trouble

Denver, Colo., July 14. — [Special.] — A secret meeting of the principal business-men and merchants was held this evening for the purpose of resisting the payment of taxes for the current year, which are levied on the full market value of the property.

It was decided to send a committee of twenty-five of the heaviest taxpayers to protest, and, in the event of their protest proving futile, sixty of the most prominent men pledged themselves to resist the payment of taxes and to do all in their power to prevent the collection of taxes from others.

Should the threat be carried into execution the county will be left without funds to meet current expenses.

The article gives no indication of what the dispute was about, and I haven’t been successful in digging up more about this threatened tax strike. (I scanned through the minutiae in Jerome C. Smiley’s History of Denver, for example, without finding a mention of it.)

This was a time in Denver history when there was dissatisfaction about the amount of control the state governor had over local spending and official appointments, so that may have had something to do with it. The city was also still reeling from the Panic of 1893.