Eleven Council Tax Strikers Fight the Edmonton Incinerator

Some links of interest:

• The council tax resistance campaign that is part of the opposition to the Edmonton Incinerator has so far attracted eleven tax resisters.
• As previously reported, the version of the “Build Back Better Act” passed by the House did not include a feared provision that would require banks to report to the IRS about more of their customers’s accounts and transactions. There was a long-shot chance that those provisions would reappear in the bill as passed by the Senate, but thusfar no such provisions have appeared in the Senate’s version of the bill. There is still some chance that the bill will be amended in the Senate to include such provisions, and I believe it’s not unheard of for provisions to get tacked on during the reconciliation process even if they weren’t in the versions of the bill that passed in either of the houses. So we won’t know for sure until the bill hits Biden’s desk. But I wouldn’t lose sleep.
• One of the bill’s provisions would remove the requirement that IRS agents get written approval from their supervisors before assessing penalties against a taxpayer. My gut feeling is that this isn’t a big deal (contra the Titanic alarm in the linked-to article about it). It might make it marginally easier for the agency to apply penalties, or somewhat more likely that those penalties will be applied in inconsistent and haphazard ways. But I suspect it mostly amounts to the trashing of a red-tape, rubber-stamp provision that didn’t have much practical effect.
• War tax resisters in Spain have contributed to more than 110 projects of social betterment with about €25,000 in redirected war taxes. You can read the complete annnual report of Spanish war tax resistance on-line.
• A group of “civil society organizations” assembled in Mahagi, Ituri, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and announced a tax strike to protest against deteriorating security in the region and the failure of the government to protect them from the CODECO group.
• NWTRCC’s December 2021 newsletter is up on their site.
• Ruth Benn looks back at the life of war tax resister Roger Franklin at NWTRCC’s blog.
• I hadn’t seen one of these news articles in a while, and was worried they’d gone out of style: Bomb threat made against IRS office in downtown Oklahoma City