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Tax Strike Tactics

Attack Tax Offices

Some tax resisters have violently attacked offices of the tax bureaucracy.

One of my favorite examples comes from India in late 2011, when two farmers responded to tax officials who had been a little too greedy in demanding bribes. They emptied three bags of cobras in the tax office.

Sporadic violence directed at tax offices may backfire by evoking public sympathy for the taxers and making the resisters seem bloodthirsty and maniacal. But it can also unearth a latent “atta boy” sentiment that the government may find as alarming as the attack itself. Some years ago, for example, a fellow named Joe Stack—not a tax resister or part of a movement, just a taxpayer who got fed up—loaded up his small plane with fuel and flew it into an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office, torching the building and killing an IRS employee (in addition to himself).

National Treasury Employees Union president Colleen Kelley said that soon after Joe Stack’s kamikaze attack, there were 70 cases in which IRS employees complained that while they were on the phone with people they were auditing or trying to collect from, the “taxpayers said they were thinking of ‘taking flying lessons.’ ”

Example Israeli Independence Movement

In 1946, Jewish independence fighters pushed a cart loaded with explosives into an income tax office in Palestine. Then they got some help from the Keystone Cops:

All employes had been evacuated from the building following a telephone warning 10 minutes before the blast. Police said three Jews, one dressed as an Arab, pushed a bomb-laden, Arab-type delivery cart into the building and fled, after clubbing a Jewish policeman and snatching a rifle from an Arab guard. Police tried to drag the cart from the building, but the rope parted. They said they then detonated the bomb with rifle fire, but “miscalculated the charge.”

The explosion destroyed the building, killed a constable, and injured five other officials.

Example Railroad Bond Shenanigans

In St. Claire county, Missouri, in 1877, “a gang of armed men rode into the county seat of Osceola and held tax officials at gunpoint while its members stole all the official tax records.… The gang destroyed the tax records, and that meant that the county had no way of taxing anyone.” A year and a half later “an armed gang… seized the railroad tax book and escaped into the night.”

Example Reform Act Agitation

During the rioting that followed the British parliament’s failure to pass the Reform Bill in 1831, the mob burned the custom house and excise office, along with many other government buildings.

Example French Revolution

In Hippolyte Taine’s history of the French Revolution, he includes several examples of attacks on tax offices:

the crowd, rushing off to the barriers, to the gates of Sainte-Claire and Perrache, and to the Guillotière bridge, burn or demolish the bureaux, destroy the registers, sack the lodgings of the clerks, carry off the money, and pillage the wine on hand in the depôt.

At Limoux, under the pretext of searching for grain, they enter the houses of the comptroller and tax contractors, carry off their registers, and throw them into the water along with the furniture of their clerks.

at Aupt and at Luc nothing remains of the weighing-house but the four walls; at Marseilles the house of the slaughter-house contractor, at Brignolles that of the director of the leather excise, are sacked: the determination is “to purge the land of excise-men.”

…the windows of the excise office are smashed, and the public notices are torn down…

During the months of July and August, 1789, the tax offices are burnt in almost every town in the kingdom.

Without waiting, however, for any legal measures, they take the authority on themselves, rush to the toll-houses and drive out the clerks…

Taine also notes of a later revolution that “in Issoudun after the three days of July, 1830, against the combined imposts[, s]even or eight thousand vine-dressers burnt the archives and tax-offices and dragged an employé through the streets, shouting out at each street-lamp, ‘Let him be hung!’ ”

Example Bonnets Rouges

In 2014, the French government finally captured and tried some of the bonnets rouges who had been destroying highway tax gantries in Brittany. On the day the defendants were sentenced, farmers in Brittany invaded the city of Morlaix, dumped their produce in big piles in the streets, set fire to the tax office, and blockaded the area to keep fire trucks from responding. Three other French tax offices were torched soon after.

Hardly a week goes by without farmers dumping manure in front of some public building… or locks are vandalized. Every day, tax officials are attacked by outraged taxpayers who are tired of getting stonewalled when they ask why their taxes have increased so much.

Example Gilets Jaunes

The gilets jaunes tried something a little different: they bricked up the entrance to the tax offices in Montargis in November, 2018.

Example Masaniello’s Revolt

In Naples in 1647, a tax revolt expressed itself with attacks on tax offices:

On one beautiful summer night the custom-house in the great market-place flew up into the air. A quantity of powder had been conveyed into it by unknown hands, and in the morning nothing remained but the blackened ruins.

Later: “the populace… put to flight the tax-gatherers and sbirri [police], crowded into the custom-house, destroyed the table and chairs, set fire to the ruins as well as the account-books, so that soon a bright flame rose up amidst the loud rejoicings of the bystanders.” The archbishop, under pressure from the crowd, “ordered them aloud, and in the presence of all, to pull down the custom-houses.”

Example Attacks in Italy

In December 2011 a letter bomb exploded in the hands of the director general of Equitalia, a quasi-private company that handles taxes in Italy. The following month, three bombs went off outside Equitalia’s offices in Naples. In May 2012 another branch was struck with molotov cocktails. “The phrases ‘Thieves’ and ‘Death to Equitalia’ were sprayed onto outside walls.”

Notes and Citations