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Tax Strike Tactics

Send Disturbing Packages or Issue Bomb Threats

In 2005 I started collecting media mentions of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) buildings that had to be evacuated because of “an envelope containing an unknown powder” or “a suspicious package” or something of the sort. It seems to be a popular hobby to harass the IRS in this way.

Michelle Lowry… who processes forms for the IRS in Austin, confronts that venom regularly. People slip razor blades and push-pins into the same envelopes as their W-2 forms. They send nasty notes with their crumpled documents. Last year during the height of the Tea Party movement, hundreds of taxpayers included—what else?—tea bags with their returns. And then there’s the weird stuff. “Sometimes you’ll see stuff that looks like blood on them,” said Lowry, who has worked as a seasonal employee for five years. “We wear gloves.”… She’s been through evacuations caused by suspicious items in the mail, such as white powder. (It turned out to be packing material.)

Sometimes these really are explicit threats, for instance an envelope sent to the IRS mail room in Kansas City in 2007 that included white powder and a note that mentioned anthrax (though the powder turned out to be talcum powder).

But frequently, the “suspicious package” turns out to be something benign but just out-of-the-ordinary enough to cause panic. In Bloomington, Illinois, in 2013, an IRS distribution center was cordoned off while a bomb squad of state and Department of Homeland Security specialists navigated a robot through the parking lot to retrieve and inspect two suspicious packages. The process took five hours, and eventually revealed that the suspicious packages contained… tax forms.

In such cases, the tax office usually makes a big and very expensive fuss, under the “better safe than sorry” principle. They evacuate the building and call in the bomb squads with their remote-controlled robots or the hazmat teams with their protective clothing and mobile decontamination rooms. The amount of disruption and expense this causes, the small effort needed to provoke it, and the low likelihood of getting caught can make this an attractive tactic. Anyone can play this game. I’ve even found a case in which 250 IRS employees got to take a long lunch thanks to “a package of foot powder mailed from a prison ZIP code.”

If there have been enough real or at least credible threats of this sort, the government’s sensitivity will be so high that it may interpret anything unusual as a threat. For example, the protest tactic of sending tea bags to politicians as a way of evoking the Boston Tea Party goes back decades, but when someone sent an envelope containing a tea bag to U.S. Representative Jared Polis in 2009, he called out the hazmat team to open it for him. He wasn’t the only legislator to react this way.

Example Voodoo Curse

Some threats are more ethereal than material. In July, 2013, IRS agents in McAllen, Texas came to work to find three charred, headless chickens arranged by the front door. Local occult specialists indicated that this was probably the residue left over from an attempt to put a voodoo curse on someone employed there. Curse specialist Ana Davila explained: “The charred animals in the parking lot point to a person wishing the target of this to veer off the road and have an accident.”

Example Give a Shit

And then there’s this, from 2003:

Angry New Zealand farmers are reportedly sending parcels of cattle manure to cabinet ministers in a campaign against a so-called “flatulence tax” on their animals. New Zealand Post said it was treating the campaign “as seriously as cyanide”

Notes and Citations