The Secret Key to I.R.S. Processing Codes

A few more interesting bits and pieces that flew past my eyeballs in recent weeks:

• Ever wonder what all those acronyms and code numbers mean on your IRS transcripts and other correspondence? If so, take a look at IRS Processing Codes and Information. The cover page is marked with the delightful message “ATTENTION: OFFICIAL USE ONLY — WHEN NOT IN USE, THIS DOCUMENT MUST BE STORED IN ACCORDANCE WITH IRM 11.3.12, MANAGER’S SECURITY HANDBOOK. Information that is of a sensitive nature is marked by the pound sign (#).” However, it is publicly available on the IRS website, and some of it is redacted, so I don’t think there are any national security secrets within.
• Someone posted scans of a “Political Art Documentation / Distribution” zine, the first issue of which was devoted to the subject of “Death and Taxes” that celebrated an art show of the same name: “From April 1–18, 1981, P.A.D. presented a public art event called Death and Taxes, to protest the use of taxes for military spending and cutbacks in social services… Twenty artists installed works in and out of doors in Manhattan and Brooklyn… The event included posters, graffiti, stickers, overprinted 1040 forms redistributed in banks, typed dollar bills, street theatre, outdoor films, environments, and performances.” Lots of punk rock aesthetic stuff with a war tax protest theme.
• The constitutionalist, “show me the law”-style tax protesters (or “tax deniers,” as the IRS spins it), which have long been an entertaining staple of the scene in the United States, are apparently becoming a rapidly-spreading phenomenon in Canada as well. “The National Post has identified 385 pending tax cases — most using florid and arcane language and claiming bizarre laws that supersede or nullify Canada’s regulations and laws; it prompted the Tax Court to adopt a triage approach to cope with the deluge, grouping cases and directing them to specific judges.”
• When tax auditors showed up at a restaurant in Archanon, Greece, last month, “there were strong reactions from customers in a large tavern, leading the auditors of the Financial Crimes unit to quickly leave.”
• Thanos Tzimeros, founder of the fledgling Greek political party “Recreate Greece,” has issued a call for tax resistance — or “robbery resistance” as he puts it. His perspective is a bit different from that of the largely leftish “don’t pay” movement. Rather than opposing the austerity and public-sector shrinking that Greece has been strong-armed into accepting by international lenders, he thinks these reforms haven’t gone nearly far enough and that the problem with Greece is that it is being strangled by a political/criminal class. If I’m parsing a Google Translate version of the Greek news article correctly, Tzimeros is encouraging people to pay their taxes into an escrow account and to refuse to turn the money over to the government until such time as it can give a satisfactory accounting of how it spends its budget. He points to bloated and redundant government agencies as examples of taxpayer money being siphoned off to fund a class of parasitical political appointees.
• Here’s the official IRS Office of Chief Counsel memorandum in which the Counsel reminds IRS employees that they cannot willy-nilly assess “frivolous filing” penalties on people who include letters of political protest along with their (otherwise accurate and complete) tax forms. And here is Peter J. Reilly’s take on the case at his Forbes blog.
• And here is another example of governments rigging traffic lights and automatic ticket-generating cameras in a way that makes intersections more dangerous… but more profitable to the taxers.
• NWTRCC has produced a set of war tax resistance talking points for media interviews that might help war tax resisters get their point of view across more effectively through the news media.
• Ruth Benn reflects on her war tax resistance, and the hapless but persistent response from the IRS, at NWTRCC’s new blog, War Tax Talk.

The Chicago Daily News Service sent out a wire report on Joan Baez that touched on her tax resistance. Here’s an excerpt from the version that made it to the Knickerbocker News of Albany, New York, on this date in 1967:

Another of Miss Baez’ means of protest against the Vietnam war is her refusal to pay the percentage of her income tax she feels would be used for armaments. “I pay 28 per cent of what they’re asking for now, and they collect the rest by liens and attaching concert fees and so on. Some people say what’s the point of it since the government gets it in the end anyway? I know they get it, plus fines, but it costs them money to get it so it evens out along the line.

“And now there are at least two groups organizing to spread this kind of protest, the War Tax Refusal, people who make the government take the money from their incomes so they don’t have to pay it. And the Taxpayers Against War, who pay the tax and plan soon to sue the government to regain that amount spent for whatever their consciences do not agree with.

“Even if nothing comes of this, it does raise a huge question in the minds of some people who might never have thought about how their money was being used. A Saigonese monk visited the Institute [for the Study of Non-Violence] one day and he said, ‘Many people in my country have heard of the woman in the United States who would not volunteer her money to drop bombs on our people’ and that’s more than anyone could ask for as results go.”