Some bits and pieces from here and there:
- The New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters is going to be held in Hardwick, Massachusetts. Details will be posted to the NWTRCC website eventually.
- The Tax Policy Center takes a closer look at those Americans who successfully pay zero income and payroll tax (about 27% of us, they estimate).
- NWTRCC is hiring a field organizer / outreach consultant. If you think you might be interested, you can find the details here.
- Hundreds of separatists in Trieste have stopped paying taxes to the Italian government.
- Erica Weiland, at the NWTRCC blog, examines the sorry set of presidential candidates we’re being asked to choose from and wonders if there’s any reason for a war tax resister to vote.
- Germán Treuz, the curate of Alcira Gigena, Argentina, caused a ruckus when he refused to pay a road toll recently, complaining that the road had not been properly maintained for years and was in poor condition. His act “had a large impact on society because he is a very well-known person,” said the mayor, and other people have come forward saying that they, too, refuse to pay for such a shoddy road. Treuz later told a radio audience: “The tollgate can be raised easily, so I say to the people: don’t pay these thieves.”
- A college student has created a chatbot legal advisor to help people fight parking and traffic tickets in select cities. So far it has successfully overturned $4 million in parking tickets.
- The IRS continues to get spanked for its former policy of stealing money from people it alleged were “structuring” bank deposits — that is, making many deposits of small amounts over time in order to avoid the reporting requirements of large deposits. In one recent development, the agency was forced to return $29,500 from a Maryland dairy farmer. The Institute for Justice did much of the work involved in forcing the IRS to return the money in this and other cases and to change its policies.
- U.C. Irvine law professor Omri Marian expects bitcoins to be the next “super tax havens.”
He says:
Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous by default. Indeed, there is a permanent record of every bitcoin transaction that is fully available to law enforcement. If you want to use bitcoin anonymously you have to take careful steps to do so.From a tax-evasion point of view, they are particularly attractive. Cryptocurrencies possess the two most important characteristics of a traditional tax haven. First, because there is no jurisdiction in which they operate (they are “held” in cyberspace accounts known as online “wallets”), they are not subject to taxation at source. Second, cryptocurrency accounts are anonymous. Users can start as many online “wallets” as they want to buy or mine Bitcoins and trade them without ever providing any identifying information.
Significantly, Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) offer one additional major advantage to tax-evaders that traditional tax havens do not: the operation of Bitcoin is not dependent on the existence of financial intermediaries such as banks. Bitcoin is exchangeable peer-to-peer by definition. Bitcoin thus seems immune to the developing international anti-evasion regime [in which] financial institutions [are] the emerging agents of tax collection… Thus, cryptocurrencies have the potential to become super tax havens.
- Here’s another example of someone paying taxes with a huge quantity of low-denomination money as a protest.
- There’s a bit of interesting background in this IRS research paper about the process the agency goes through when it detects that someone has failed to file a tax return.
