Some short bits from recent days:
- The site My War Tax purports to calculate how much you, personally, are paying for the Iraq War. You type in your taxable income for , and the site calculates your bill for you (and lets you know how it made the calculation so you can see if it makes sense to you).
- Kat Kanning wrote up the story of the civil disobedience actions that she, her husband Russell, Dave Ridley, and Lauren Canario have been doing at the IRS offices in Keene, New Hampshire, for the Keene Free Press. NH Insider also did a story on the Dave Ridley case. And if you’re tired of reading, you can watch an action-in-progress on YouTube. As Kat Kanning’s article noted, this action was organized and enacted in less than twenty-four hours, and ten local activists attended on short notice.
- The U.S. Congress is toying with the idea of shutting down the recently-adopted IRS practice of using private debt collection agencies to hunt down people who don’t pay taxes. At a hearing, one Representative played a tape of one such private debt collection agency harassing its prey over the phone (here’s a PDF transcript).
- The IRS is still having a hell of a time bringing its database into the 21st century. The latest TIGTA audit of the project found that the “pattern of deferring Project requirements to later releases and missing release deployment dates has continued” with yet another over-budget missed deadline and with requirements radically scaled-back at the last minute (some of these requirements have been deferred for over five years now).
