I skimmed a bit of the pitch for Obama’s new budget proposal to see if there was anything there we tax resisters ought to keep an eye out for. A few things caught my eye:
- Some years back, when “deadbeat dads” were the objects of the latest Hate Week, Congress set up something called the “National Directory of New Hires” so that if anyone who owed child support got a job, the government would be on them like flies on shit to make sure they made their payments. Obama would give the IRS access to this database “for general tax administration purposes, including data matching, verification of taxpayer claims during return processing, preparation of substitute returns for non-compliant taxpayers, and identification of levy sources.”
- Obama would also make “repeated willful failure to file a tax return” a felony, rather than a series of misdemeanors like it is today. “Repeated” would be defined as a failure to file returns for any three years within a five-year period, if the total tax liability during that period is at least $50,000.
- Obama would index all penalty amounts in the Internal Revenue Code to inflation, so that they would increase every year automatically rather than increases requiring Congressional action.
These are only proposals, of course, and Congress will have its own ideas, but they give you some idea of what sort of things are percolating through the mire in Washington.
