Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Democratic Republic of the Congo → tax strikes in North & South Kivu, 2015–21

Today, a pile of tax resistance links from hither and yon:

International Tax Resistance News

• There seems to be something of a tax insurrection in Denmark including the torching of a tax office and ten tax administration vehicles.
• Dave Ridley, on The Ridley Report podcast, ponders whether or not it is ethical to try to drain resources from the government in order to weaken it (for example, by filing lawsuits against it, or forcing its bureaucracy to waste time) or whether this is just adding insult to the original injury the government performed by taking the wasted funds from the taxpayer.
• Protesters in Detroit, Michigan, blocked the street in front of the county treasury building to protest the fact that despite plunging property values in Detroit, many homes have not been reassessed in years (in spite of a law mandating annual reassessments), and so the owners are on the hook for artificially inflated property taxes, which is pushing some of them into tax foreclosures.
• A brothel in Salzburg, Austria, has launched a free drinks and free sex promotion to protest high taxes on its receipts. You will probably not be surprised to learn that the protest has been wildly popular with the brothel’s clientele as well as with clickbait “news” sites.
• Residents of Beni, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, have launched a tax strike to protest against the government’s failure to provide them with adequate security against atrocities committed by the Allied Democratic Forces rebels. The tax resistance comes on the heels of a week-long general strike, and is being organized by “civil society” groups. The taxes being resisted are largely business taxes, both those on larger businesses and stall-fees paid by market vendors. Some of the organizers have reported being subjected to death threats.
• Palmerstown (Ireland) Residents against Water Charges held a mass burning of their water bills a little while back. Meanwhile, petitions signed by 15,000 anti-water charge protesters were given the cold shoulder in Cork.
• Market vendors in Githurai, Kenya have started withholding taxes from the county government to protest the government’s unwillingness or inability to provide basic services to the market.
• As Greece prepares to bid a national “δεν πληρώνω” (“won’t pay”) to their international creditors, the domestic δεν πληρώνω movement continues to innovate — lately with a new smartphone app that tells public transit users where they can expect ticket auditors and which stations are free-and-clear. Fines are down by ¼ to ⅓ from their numbers last year. In addition, overall tax revenue is in a tailspin in Greece. The government hoped to bring in €3.728 billion in May, for example, and only managed to scrape up €2.722 billion.

War Tax Resistance News

• Pioneering American war tax resister Juanita Nelson, who helped found the first modern American group devoted to war tax resistance (Peacemakers) in 1948, and who died earlier this year, was honored with a festive parade in her hometown of Greenfield, Massachusetts.
• War tax resister Don Schrader explains his stand in the New Mexico Daily Lobo: “How much good is it to pray, hope, and march for peace if we pay for war?”
• The group Conscience, which had been an important voice for war tax resisters in the U.K., has been undertaking an image makeover lately, in which it has deemphasized tax resistance in favor of lobbying and, alas, lately is lobbying for a particularly pathetic “taxes for peace” bill that is a somewhat new formulation of the “peace tax”-style legislation but that has at least as many flaws as such bills usually have.

IRS Woes

• I see another IRS building has been evacuated because of a “suspicious package” — this time in Andover, Massachusetts.
• The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration identified an estimated two and a half billion dollars in previously-unnoticed fraudulently-requested tax refunds issued by the IRS for tax year 2012. That’s roughly the size of the budget of the National Parks Service. Many of the payments went to addresses outside of the country, like to Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Ireland, so maybe I should have compared it to a foreign aid program: in the same ballpark as the amount the State Department gave to Israel.
• The problem (or is it a solution) of identity theft playing havoc on the U.S. tax system is only likely to get worse… especially after hackers managed to lift personnel records for just about every employee of the federal government including social security numbers and a wealth of other identifying information.

Some international tax resistance news that has flashed over my screen in recent days:

Catalonia

• A report in Negocios.com suggests that the campaign to get Catalan municipalities to send their taxes to the Catalan government rather than to Spain has flopped. According to the report, only 70 to 80 of the 941 municipalities signed on to the largely-symbolic tax resistance plan, even though in 248 of them, Catalan separatists have a governing majority.
• On the other hand, this report says that Catalonia is well on its way to creating an independent tax agency and that mass tax resistance is only a matter of time.

The U.K.

• Low-income workers in Britain are becoming subject to council taxes from which they were previously exempt. The councils are expecting mass tax refusal and some are comparing it to Thatcher’s Poll Tax.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo

• Tax collection in the North Kivu region ground to a halt in a protest against degraded security in the region.

Spain

• The High Court of Valencia recently declared that Spanish citizens do not have the right to withhold tax payments for reasons of conscientious objection to military spending.

Greece

• 4,000 people in Crete have each paid only €1 of their road taxes in a protest there. The action was organized by «Λαϊκής Στάσης Πληρωμών» (“People Stop Paying”), which last year held a similar protest that only attracted some dozens of participants. The group is protesting against rising taxes at a time of increasing economic difficulties, and that the taxes are not actually going to crucially needed road improvements. That group is also organizing protests at government auctions of seized property.

global

• A record number of U.S. citizens renounced their citizenship last quarter and we’re set for another record year of this.

Some tabs that have opened in my browser in recent days:

• Some relatives of victims of last year’s terrorist attack in Paris are refusing to pay the victims’ tax arrears, saying the money is doing more to promote terrorism than to protect them, and specifically that it is insulting to tax the victims to pay for the legal defense of the perpetrators.
• Activists in the North Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are using tax resistance to pressure the government to provide better security.
• Haringey retiree Paul Nicolson has been refusing to pay his council tax in protest against austerity measures that made Britain’s most poor subject to this tax for the first time.

  By refusing to pay, Nicolson says he wanted to get “on the receiving end of the enforcement procedure in solidarity with the poorest residents of Haringey”. “Threats of eviction are being shelled out by computers all the time,” he says. “Food, clothes, fuel, transport and other necessities are all competing with council tax and rent for the £73 benefit — there is a massive competition which simply can’t work. People might give up food to pay the taxes because of the threat of court or eviction.”

• The Greek-style protest of storming toll gates and waving the drivers through appears to have spread to Toulouse.
• Die Presse looks at the dismal state (for the State) of tax collection in Greece.

Recently-discovered links of interest:

• Helen Thornley’s talk summarizing her research on the Women’s Tax Resistance League is now available to view on-line.
• Another tax day has come and gone, and Ruth Benn of NWTRCC reflects on what motivates her to get up and out on the streets to protest year after year: Why Bother?
• “A suspicious item that shut down an IRS building in Palm Springs turned out to be an energy drink can with a note.”
• “Civil society organizations” in Beni, North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have responded to the government’s unwillingness or inability to provide security in the area by calling on people to refuse to pay their taxes.
• Rochas Okorocha, governor of Imo, Nigeria, has apparently decided that he can impose a “Community Levy” on people in the state, without bothering to go through the legislature. This is unconstitutional, points out Obi Nwakanma, who calls on Nigerians to “refuse to pay this levy, and be prepared to run anyone out of town who comes to them to collect this levy.”
• Tax evaders in Australia who are detected and fined so rarely end up paying their taxes and fines anyway that — according to Chris Leech in his paper “Detect and Deter or Catch and Release: Are Financial Penalties an Effective Way to Penalise Deliberate Tax Evaders?” — “deliberate tax evaders may be, on average, financially better off for having evaded tax and been caught, than if they had paid their correct amount of tax in the first place.”

Some links from here and there:

• The “Extinction Rebellion” group launched its council tax strike in London at its “summer uprising” earlier this month. The group is trying to get the government to stop spending money on transportation and infrastructure projects that exacerbate climate change, and are taking the lead by redirecting their taxes to greener projects in an act of civil disobedience. Here is some coverage of the tax strike launch in Al Jazeera and from Financial Times.
• Fire, spray paint, demolition, bags and tape, even an axe… People around Europe are using a variety of means to fight back against the speed camera radar outposts that ticket drivers.
• At his Forbes blog, Robert W. Wood reminds us that the new Prime Minister of the U.K., Boris Johnson, also renounced his U.S. citizenship so as to stop paying taxes to Uncle Sam.
• Merchants in Budalangi, Kenya, have organized to threaten the government there with a tax strike. The Mau Mau Market Business Association chairman issued a statement saying that unless the government makes necessary infrastructure improvements, the traders will begin refusing to pay taxes on September 1^st.
• The Société Civile group in Beni, Democratic Republic of the Congo, has again called for a boycott of taxes to protest the government’s inability to provide security.

Some recent links from here and there:

• Brayton & Suzanne Belote Shanley of the Agape Community are interviewed at NWTRCC’s blog about their war tax resistance and the intentional community they cofounded with war tax resistance at its core.
• Vendors in Pakistan are ramping up their anti-tax protest after a brief shut-down strike last month with new street protests.
• Venetian separatists are again refusing to pay taxes to Italy, paying their federal taxes instead to “Veneto State”.
• Some 17,000 taxpayers in Catalonia also are paying their federal taxes to the Catalan tax agency rather than the Spanish one, in acts of civil disobedience.
• There’s a tax strike underway in Beni, North Kivu to protest the failure of the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to provide security in the region.
• More roadside traffic ticket generating speed cameras have been attacked in recent weeks, in South Arica and France. Spain has moved on to using drones instead.
• There’s not a lot of meat on the bones here, but Andrew Leahey connects the dots and shows how Trump’s contempt for paying his own taxes and his undermining of the prestige of government are likely to undermine “tax morale” in the United States with long-term consequences for how willing traditionally sheepish American taxpayers are to cough up their tribute.
• Researchers into the impact of the government “shutdown” last Winter found that it landed blows against IRS workers in the community they studied.

  Of the furloughed workers surveyed, more than 35% missed a rent or mortgage payment, 30% went to a food pantry, 72% experienced mental health issues, 42% wanted to make a career change and 65% were very or somewhat concerned about their finances post-shutdown.

  In the open-ended response portion of the survey, an employee wrote, “We are U.S.A. citizens that have families to support. Often we hear we deserve it, because we work for IRS. We are doing a job that is dictated by Congress. It is surprising how people seem to want others to hurt. It is sort of sickening.”

  Another employee described going back to work during tax season: “With a month of catch up at my busiest season, it is so stressful. This is the first time in 15 years I am exhausted after work and do not want to go in the mornings. That was never the case before.”

Some links from here and there:

• YouTuber Alexis Buschmann has started to offer spoken-word interpretations of some of NWTRCC’s introductory war tax resistance material on her video blog. This could be a useful resource for people who prefer to get their information in the podcast/audiobook style rather than through text. Here’s a sample:
  
• American anti-abortion tax resister Michael Bowman continues his streak of courtroom luck. This time, a hung jury foiled the government’s attempt to convict him of misdemeanor charges of failure to file. (In an earlier victory, the court threw out an additional charge of felony tax evasion.) The government may decide to refile the misdemeanor charges and try again. “They put me on the stand,” said Bowman, “they know what kind of witness I am. And round two, they haven’t seen anything yet; I’ve learned.”
  • Bowman’s attorney tried at one point to advance the argument that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires the government to accommodate Bowman’s sincere religious objection to paying for abortion with his taxes. Although the courts have rejected such arguments in the past with reference to war tax resisters, the Supreme Court’s subsequent Hobby Lobby ruling seemed to possibly open the door to reconsidering this. The trial court disagreed.
  • War tax resisters have also considered using Hobby Lobby as a foot-in-the-door in this way.
• American war tax resister and tireless activist Frances Crowe has died at age 100:
  • Frances Crowe, Peace Activist and War Resister, Dies at 100 (New York Times)
  • Frances Crowe, WTR and Anti-War Activist Extraordinaire (NWTRCC blog)
  • Remembering Legendary Peace Activist Frances Crowe, Who Died at 100 After Decades of Resisting War (Democracy Now)
• Tax resisters in Beni (Democratic Republic of the Congo), who are protesting the government’s inability to provide security to residents of the war-torn region, are more formally organizing under the banner Nipe Amani Nami nilipe Ushuru na Kodi (Give Me Peace and I’ll Give You Taxes).
• Automated traffic ticket camera resistance continues around the world, with recent attacks on the machines in France, Italy, and Germany.

Some links from here and there:

• Rutgers International Institute for Peace has begun releasing a Digital Library of Nonviolent Resistance with items from their archives. Among these is Organizing Tax Resistance, co-written by a team from Nonviolence International and Karen Marysdaughter from NWTRCC.
• Humans of Earth continue their valiant war against the traffic ticket emitting robot hordes. With fire, spray paint, and gunfire, burning tires, and toppling, radar cameras across Europe have been disabled in recent weeks.
• John Dangelo profiles American Quaker war tax resister Joan H. Nicholson, and Ralph J. Dolan looks back on the life of recently-passed American war tax resister Frances Crowe.
• The Delta Amacuro (Venezuela) state Chamber of Commerce has launched a tax strike to protest what they say are extralegal and “confiscatory” municipal taxes.
• The Nkafu branch of La Société Civile has signed on to the latest tax resistance campaign in the east Congo to protest the government’s inability or unwillingness to provide security in the region.

In other news, the group ADNic is promoting a Nicaraguan tax resistance / consumer strike campaign with a series of graphics. Here are some examples (translations mine):

In other news…

• A large-scale strike in France this weekend, seemingly largely focused on opposition to government pension reform plans, coincides with a truck blockade across the country to protest diesel fuel tax increases. These blockades will snag highways, but related blockades also are specifically targeting fuel depots, with the result that hundreds of fuel stations in France have run out of gasoline.
• The Nouvelle Société Civile du Congo has called for a complete tax strike in North Kivu to protest the government’s failure to provide security in the region.
• The human war on traffic-ticket-generating robots continues, with the robot hordes taking casualties in Germany, Italy, and France in recent weeks. In France, according to a new government report, 17,886 photo radar devices have been attacked over the past two years.
• The Tax Foundation has run the numbers to show how increases in cigarette taxes cause increases in cigarette smuggling to match. For example, more than half of the cigarettes smoked in New York have been smuggled in from outside the state to evade taxes.
• Another hazmat scare — this one apparently an abandoned suitcase in a driveway — rattled the IRS office in Chamblee, Georgia.

In other news…

• The New York Times reports on how some clever fraudsters used an opaque scheme called “cum-ex trading” to get tens of billions of dollars in double-tax refunds from European countries.
• The war on speed radar cameras continues, with recent attacks in France and Italy. The French government is trying to refortify the cameras with designs that are resistant to attack, but these too are being knocked out of service as fast as they are deployed.
• A while back I noted that the IRS was in a tussle with some county governments over the fees those governments were charging to file liens (including tax liens). The IRS refused to pay a portion of the fees, and so the counties refused to register the agency’s liens. It looks like the IRS was the one to blink in this stand-off.
• In Goma, North Kivu a group calling itself Lutte pour le Changement / LUCHA (“Struggle for Change”), has called on merchants at the Alanine market to stop paying their market taxes in protest against the government’s unwillingness to address unsanitary conditions there.

Some links from here and there:

Rebels removed a radar camera and replaced it with this rat d’art.

• The heartening human rebellion against traffic ticket issuing robots continues. In recent weeks, speed cameras have been disabled by human rebels in Canada, Italy, and France, yet more in England, Italy, France, Canada, and Belgium, and several more in France, where, in spite of the hundreds of speed cameras destroyed and the government’s warning that this would make the roads more dangerous, traffic fatalities have fallen during the rebellion.
• If the Democrats running for President can agree on one thing, it’s more money and power for the IRS. The just-released Trump administration budget proposal aims for small budget increases for the agency as well.
• A “men’s magazine” I’d never heard of before called MEL has published “The Case for an American Tax Strike” with the delightful subhead: “Nice oligarchy you’ve got there. Be a shame if we quit paying for it…”
• The Democratic Republic of the Congo doesn’t make it into my news feed very often for other reasons, but the provinces of North and South Kivu seem to throw tax strikes every other week. The tactic seems to be well-established there as a way for the people to regulate and check the political power of the government. In the latest example, residents of the city of Kamituga met and decided to refuse to pay taxes until the government repairs the road that connects that city to the rest of the province. They have been joined by Baraka and Fizi.
• Latest estimates from the Cost of Wars project put the price tag of the War on Iraq to U.S. taxpayers at some $2,000,000,000,000 so far, “roughly $8,000 per U.S. taxpayer, representing 9 percent of the national debt.”
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out. It seems to mostly recycle recent blog posts, but also includes reports that the IRS may be over-zealously (and extra-legally) applying “frivolous filing” penalties again, news on how to use the revamped W-4 form to adjust your tax withholding so you can resist payment, and a brief note on the NWTRCC national gathering coming up in May in Chicago.

In other news…

• Protesters in South Kivu were denied a permit to march and were stopped by a line of police when they tried. So they did as they do in Kivu, and announced a tax strike.
• Attacks on traffic-ticket-issuing robot cameras continue around Europe, with machines destroyed or disabled in Italy and France in recent weeks. Meanwhile in New York City, protesters held up signs warning drivers about speed camera placements.
• An IRS mail room employee in Alabama “became sick today after being exposed to a package containing an unknown, potentially hazardous liquid” that spilled from “an international letter”.
• A homeowner in Cornwall stopped paying council tax when her property was made worthless by damage from a leaking water pipe the council refuses to fix. The council relented and wrote off some of the back taxes but she keeps resisting, and they’re fighting her again.
• Crispin Sartwell reminds progressives that increasing taxation is a poor method to fight economic inequality. Excerpt:

  Taxing rich people redistributes their wealth to defense contractors, which are owned and run by rich people. About 40 percent of discretionary spending goes to federal contractors; a primary result of a wealth tax or a much higher tax rate on the wealthy will be a recirculation among corporate titans.

  Service on the national debt totaled $325 billion, so a significant and ever-growing portion of the money obtained in the apparent pursuit of equality will be redistributed to bondholders, or recirculated through the world banking system. The governments of China and Japan each own over a trillion dollars in U.S. debt, for example, and so we’ll be taxing American rich people and redistributing their wealth to foreign governments, and to rich people elsewhere in the world.

In other news…

• Tax resisters in South Kivu have supplemented their campaign, which started last Friday, with a shutdown of the airport and with protest marches.
• Fire, spray paint, stickers, a burning tire, projectiles, and saws are among the tools drivers have been using in recent attacks on speed radar ticketing machines in Italy, The Netherlands, and France.
• A new (I think) site — ProuMonarquia.cat (with associated hashtag #ProuMonarquia) — is coordinating nationalist tax resistance in Catalonia. The site recommends that people redirect the amount of their federal taxes that would go to the support of the Spanish monarchy and to the state security apparatus that represses Catalan independence, giving that amount instead to the separatist Council for the Catalan Republic.

In other news…

• Listen along as Jamie Maclaren, one of the organizers of the Strathcona tax resistance campaign, discusses what’s going on, on The Mike Smyth Show.
• Another tax strike in South Kivu, as the Federation of Businesses of Congo organized a hartal in Baraka that includes tax resistance along with a general strike.
• A Hazmat team was sent to a local IRS office to check out “a suspicious letter.”
• The human rebellion against traffic ticket robots continues, with robots taking casualties in France & Germany and more in France in recent weeks.

Some links from here and there:

• There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:
  • a recap of the on-line lecture on tax resistance tactics I gave for the #MoneyRebellion group of environmental activists from the U.K.
  • an overview of the last NWTRCC national conference
  • counselors’ notes, including:
    • The IRS is still (improperly) threatening people with frivolous filing penalties if they send letters of protest along with their tax returns.
    • The new QR-codes that the IRS has started to include on past-due notices present a possible security issue for some tax resisters.
    • An appeals court affirmed that you cannot discharge federal tax debt in bankruptcy if you have willfully “attempted in any manner to evade or defeat” the tax.
  • Ruth Benn shares her thoughts on how “all-or-nothing syndrome” keeps some people from considering resistance, and Ilene Roizman shares her struggle to purchase health insurance as a self-employed non-filer (both of these have appeared previously on NWTRCC’s blog).
• Traffic ticket robots continue to succumb to attacks of enraged motorists, lately in Canada, France, Reunion, & Germany, and France, Reunion, Guadeloupe, & Qatar.
• Meanwhile, I’m starting to think it would be more newsworthy if there weren’t another tax strike brewing in South Kivu.

Some recent links of note:

• NWTRCC kicked off this year’s federal tax filing season with a panel consisting of the experienced war tax resisters Kathy Kelly, Sam Yerger, Erica Leigh, Charlie Hurst, and Maria Smith, who explained their approaches to resistance and took questions from a live audience. You can view a video of the panel and the Q&A here.
• The IRS has officially delayed the start of the 2021 tax season, and is begging filers to file electronically rather than by using old-fashioned paper returns, since the agency still hasn’t processed 40% of the paper returns it received last year!
• Bars and restaurants in Cesena, Italy, who have been suffering through pandemic closures, launched a tax strike and publicized their protest by symbolically opening their establishments and having their staff wait on empty tables.
• You may remember that there were lots of empty threats to refuse to pay taxes to the Trump administration four years ago. Now it’s time for empty tax resistance threats from the Trumperists. Mel Magazine has collected several, and compares them with other examples of tax resistance and tax protest from American history. At American Greatness, Trumperist contributor Dan Gelernter advocates mass tax resistance against the Biden administration, but wants somebody else to lead it first and somehow make it safe and easy:

  [S]uppose… that the governor of a state like Texas or Florida were to say: Citizens of this state should not pay federal taxes this year, and our state will indemnify its citizens against federal prosecution. In other words, the state would assume the federal tax bill for its own citizens, and declare it null and void.

  Meanwhile, one of the more unhinged Trumperists decided it would be a good idea to publicly tweet an increasingly violent series of fantasies including threatening the life of a traffic cop, killing Nancy Pelosi, running over “a million people” in a speeding car, and… bombing the IRS headquarters. That last bit got him indicted on federal charges.
• TIGTA has released another report on the federal government’s use of private debt collection companies to pursue unpaid taxes. The report says that the companies recovered a mere 1.79% of the unpaid taxes they were assigned, and that more than a third of the money collected went to cover costs and profit for the private companies, with the remainder going to the Treasury.
• The National Taxpayer Advocate also released its report recently. It highlights some of the many problems the IRS had to cope with and/or exacerbate during the year of pandemic shutdowns and greater-than-usual government dysfunction. For example: Taxpayers got misleading tax notices that included deadlines to respond that had already passed by the time the notice was sent. People who tried to call the IRS were able to get through to an agency employee less than 25% of the time. Taxpayer records are processed on “the oldest major IT systems in the federal government,” but Congress has appropriated only about 8¼% of the estimated cost of updating them.
• Hey, what do you know? Another tax strike is brewing in South Kivu. This strike, which is scheduled to start in February, is meant to pressure the government to repair roads and bridges in the region.

Some recent links of note:

• The IRS has announced that not only will it issue stimulus payments and Paycheck Protection Program loans to people and businesses even if those people or businesses are behind on their taxes, but also that the agency will not levy bank accounts into which those payments are deposited — for 24 weeks in the case of PPP loans, or 8 weeks in the case of stimulus payments.

  Current IRS policy says that agents should contact taxpayers before issuing a levy to ask whether the account in question recently received such a payment. If so, they are supposed to refrain from levying until the proper number of weeks have passed.

  If the IRS tries to levy a bank account in which you have recently deposited such a check, you can protest this and the IRS is supposed to release the levy.

  In either case, this should give you plenty of time to empty out the account so that a future levy attempt will fail.

• Tax blogger Peter J. Reilly concludes that IRS Collections Appears To Be Broken. Excerpt:

  I fear that waiting out the ten year statute of limitations on collections is becoming a reasonable strategy and that many “taxpayers” have caught on and that the IRS, when it comes to collection, is to a significant degree bluffing.

  My overall takeaway from the [recent Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration] report is that the IRS has a lot of outstanding receivables that it does nothing about. That made me want to look more closely at the numbers.

  Working with the spreadsheets is a little frustrating. They don’t answer all the questions I would like answered, but it does give a pretty clear idea that the IRS is something of a shadow of its former self.

  At the end of the 2010 Fiscal Year, the balance of assessed tax, penalties and interest (ATPI) was $114.2 billion spread among 10.4 million accounts. In that year IRS filed 1,096,376 notices of federal tax lien and requested 3,606,818 levies on third party. IRS wrote off $14.6 billion that had expired due to the ten year statute.

  At the end of the 2019 Fiscal Year ATPI was $125.8 billion spread among 11.2 million accounts. There were 543,604 liens and 782,735 levies. $34.2 billion expired due to the ten year statute.

  It is important to remember that when we are talking about collections, we are talking about tax that has already been assessed. This has nothing to do with people who have not filed or who underreported income and have not gotten caught. That is an entirely different kettle of fish.

  Through my decades of tax practice, the notion of flat out not paying assessed tax was not something that was in my bag of tricks. It has slowly dawned on me that this is a thing.

• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out, with content including:
  • A look ahead to the 2021 tax season including the launch of a new focus on tax resistance as a way to protest against police militarization.
  • And a look at U.S. military policy as a new administration takes over in Washington
  • Some notes on how IRS policy is changing.
  • A letter to the IRS from former State Department employee Fred Burks about how he’s decided to stop paying a portion of his federal income taxes to protest immorality, illegality, and corruption in U.S. military policy.
• Poland’s government has put a new tax on media advertising in non-governmental media. It claims the tax is simply a revenue measure designed to shore up the public health system. The news media claim that this is an attempt to use the taxation power to bankrupt and destroy the free press. In protest, media outlets including television, radio, and newspapers across the country suspended news coverage for 24 hours, displaying protest messages on a stark black background instead.
• A tax strike by restaurants and bars in Italy has begun. The strike is being organized by Movimento Imprese Ospitalità, which is a project of the tourist industry branch of the General Confederation of Italian Industry. It is protesting continued tax collection at a time of collapsing business during the Covid pandemic.
• I’ve seen a few more articles that give some additional details about the latest tax strike in South Kivu:
  • Uvira: The tax resistance campaign is launched, traders and shippers are cheering it on
  • South Kivu: Tax resistance launched in four territories to demand the rehabilitation of national roads #2 and #5
  • South Kivu: A tax resistance campaign is announced in four territories
  The campaigns have been organized and led by what are vaguely referred to as “la société civile” (civil society). This refers to some sort of preexisting groups, but I don’t really understand what they are. They seem to be non-governmental organizations that sometimes behave as parallel governments or service providers, other times as sorts of citizens’ unions or chambers of commerce.
• Guillermo Incer Medina, in Confidencial, evaluates the tactics used by the protesters in Nicaragua who have been struggling with the Ortega regime. He concludes that the best high-impact, low-risk action would be tax resistance from a small number of large-scale taxpayers. Excerpt:

  In Nicaragua, 94% of the total tax collection comes from large taxpayers (a large taxpayer is a company that has large volumes of transactions and, therefore, that collects taxes such as VAT, IR — and others– in large amounts. Examples of these could be supermarket chains, large importers, large commercial establishments, or large agro-industrial consortia).

  In our country, the sectors with the largest taxpayers are industry, commerce, finance, transportation, and services. In these sectors, large taxpayers collect more than 90% of the total taxes of their respective sector (which is to say that of every 100 córdobas that is collected from taxes in each sector, 90 córdobas are contributed by large taxpayers and only 10 córdobas by mid-sized and small ones). Furthermore, in areas such as liquors, beers, soft drinks, and fuel, the large taxpayers collect 100% of the total taxes.

  Why is this important? Because the dictatorship needs taxes to maintain its repressive apparatus and its patronage politics. If you take the oxygen out of their horror machine and purchase of consciences, you take away their room for maneuver.

  “Let’s do a consumer strike!” said COSEP and AMCHAM representatives every time we demanded a national strike. This is a mistake for two reasons: 1) for a consumer strike to have a real and not symbolic effect, requires that millions of unorganized Nicaraguans, including pro-government people, decide to deprive themselves of consuming goods that are difficult for them to obtain due to the precarious living conditions in which we live, 2) it is useless for us to stop consuming (not paying VAT) if companies still pay the State taxes such as IR and others (one must keep in mind that those who directly “deliver” taxes to the State are not we the consumers, but they are the collectors — the companies).

  What can one do then? The action that could have the greatest impact at the lowest cost and in the shortest term is tax resistance from the large taxpayers, which is nothing more than the large companies stopping payment of taxes to the dictatorship for a period long enough to oblige them to make concessions for his departure.

  “They are going to close us down!”, the big businesses say immediately. But it is not likely that the government will close large companies due to how this would look to foreign investment, and due to the political cost of sending thousands of people into the streets. Furthermore, if they close large companies, this would in practice have the same effect as tax resistance, since they would stop receiving their taxes. “We are exposing thousands to unemployment!”, they also say… more jobs are being jeopardized by letting this political and humanitarian crisis drag on and by the coming interruption of CAFTA and ADA, if the dictatorship continues to do what it wants and stays five more years. “It’s too risky!” It is more risky to put your body on the line in a march or a roadblock, or to go on a hunger strike in a church and get shot, cut off your services, and imprison those who want to help you. There is no large, medium, or small company that is worth more than a human life.

  Tax resistance is more feasible than other actions of high-risk and low-impact (such as a chain of express pickets or coordinated sit-ins) because it does not require the coordination of thousands of unorganized people. To promote tax resistance, it is enough that a few of the largest companies, which are already organized in chambers, agree, stand firm, and coordinate among themselves.

• Gig workers in Serbia used to be more or less income-tax free, apparently. Not any more. A new law not only makes them liable for income tax, but requires them to cough up taxes for the last five years. Marchers in Belgrade protested the new tax law.
• Here’s another example of a a false-alarm “suspicious package” gumming up the works at an IRS processing center.

Some recent links of note:

• One of the Extinction Rebellion tax resisters, Jane Rogers, tells her story. Excerpt:

  Money, even in tiny amounts, talks. If money — money from a growing number of tax rebels — refuses to go where the government is trying to put it, then together we can make a difference.

  That’s why I’m appealing to other self-employed writers to join me in this tax resistance.

  Rogers is part of “The Earth Tax Strike” group, which is holding its withheld taxes in an escrow account which they say they’ll pay when the government meets their demands.
• In South Kivu, the government locked a group of women traders out of the marketplace. The women have been refusing taxes there as part of a campaign to pressure the government to fix roads in the region.
• At the NWTRCC blog, Ruth Benn looks back at the creative tax resistance street theater of John-Ed Croft.
• Bob Bady discussed the lives of war tax resisters Juanita & Wally Nelson on KZFR (segment starts at 32:40).
• The human battle against traffic ticket robots continues, with recent attacks in the United States, Germany, France, and Martinique.

Some recent tax resistance links of note:

• Long-time war tax resisters Arcadi Oliveres and David Zarembka have died. Oliveres was one of the founders of the modern war tax resistance movement in Spain, while Zarembka was one of those who helped NWTRCC get off the ground in the United States, serving as its first treasurer. More info:
  • An interview (in Spanish) with Arcadi Oliveres about war tax resistance from 2018
  • “We cannot go to the protests saying that we don’t want war and then finance it” (brief excerpt from another interview with Arcadi Oliveres)
  • Obituaries of Arcadi Oliveres: Catorze, TOT Sant Cugat, El País
  • Chuck Faber’s tribute to David Zarembka on A Friendly Letter, including autobiographical writings from Zarembka himself that go into his five decades of war tax resistance in detail
  • David Zarembka memorial on Keeper
• In my last update I noted that the city government of Vic had decided to stop remitting its taxes to the Spanish federal government, instead sending those taxes to the independence-minded Catalan government. Vic has now been joined by Girona, capital of Girona province, as well as some other medium-sized towns.
• The latest issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter is out. It includes information about the upcoming NWTRCC National Gathering and other news of interest to American war tax resisters.
• NWTRCC has also put out its annual tax season press release about war tax resistance actions.
• The “Lutte pour le changement” (LUCHA) movement in North Kivu has called on the citizenry there to refuse to pay taxes until peace is restored to the Congolese province. The group and other activist groups in the region have augmented their tax resistance campaign with a multi-day hartal and sit-in protests.
• The War Resisters League has released the fiscal year 2022 version of its popular “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart.
• The U.S. State Department can refuse to give you a passport or can revoke your existing passport if the IRS tells them you’re way behind on your taxes and aren’t doing anything about it. And the IRS can make this happen just by notifying the State Department. Is that unconstitutional? To take away your fundamental right to travel without due process of law? Paul L. Caron, at TaxProf Blog, investigates the issue and a recent test case that did a poor job of trying to test it in Tax Court. Caron doesn’t think the constitutionality argument will work, even if it is raised more competently in a more receptive legal forum. For one thing, the right of an American citizen to travel internationally is not very well protected by American law: the courts do not consider it to be all that important. For that reason, the courts’ threshold for what they consider sufficient “due process” to deprive you of such a right is pretty low.
• President Biden has now come out and said explicitly what had been suspected: that he hopes to help fund his spending spree by increasing IRS enforcement spending, as part of a sock-it-to-big-business plan that also includes increasing corporate tax rates, broadening the corporate tax base, and eliminating big business loopholes. We’ll have to keep an eye on this as it burbles through the legislative tract.
• Hey look: more traffic ticket camera destruction in Germany and France.

Some recent links of note:

• Extinction Rebellion is launching a “Climate Emergency Council Tax Strike”

  Our movement has only scratched the surface of what non-violent civil disobedience can achieve. While they deceive and seek to oppress us further, we can take a stand against their ecocidal leadership — by simply withholding council tax then telling the world why we’ve done it.

  The campaign is asking local groups in the U.K. to demand that their local councils declare a climate emergency and suspend projects that are ecologically irresponsible.
• Conscience U.K. held an on-line seminar exploring the history of conscientious objection to military taxation featuring Karen Robinson, Robin Brookes, Mary Lou Leavitt, and Monica Frisch.
  
• Another detail of the Biden administration’s plan to beef up IRS tax enforcement has come out. They hope to force banks to report information about everyone’s bank accounts: how much came into and out of each account over the year. This would help them identify income sources that people and businesses fail to report on their tax returns. But it would also put more bank accounts on the agency’s radar. Currently, they only seem to be very aware of interest-earning bank accounts, via the reporting of this interest on annual 1099 filings. This has allowed some tax resisters to have bank accounts that are relatively invisible to the IRS (and thereby less-vulnerable to seizure) by having non-interest-bearing accounts. The proposed reporting changes might remove this protection.

• Catalan separatists have amplified their tax resistance campaign. For some time now the Catalan National Assembly has been promoting a campaign in which individuals, businesses, and (an increasing number of) municipalities would redirect their national taxes from Spain to the Catalan regional government. That government would forward those taxes along to Spain, so the effect of this (and its risk) was minor, but in theory if the Catalan regional government decided to pull the trigger on political independence, this would establish the groundwork for fiscal independence as well.

  But now, the separatist “Council for the Republic” is trying to push things further: asking resisters to redirect €300 of their taxes from the government to the Republican Fund for Solidarity Action. That money will not be forwarded to Madrid, and so this is a more confrontational act of civil disobedience.

  The group has launched the campaign with the #Proumonarquia site (“Build the Catalan Republic with your taxes”) and two videos: a how-to narrated by actor Toni Albà and an overview of tax resistance by long-time war tax resister Josep Manel Fontdevila.

• Attorney Peter Goldberger will discuss the prospects for people who might try to assert that people have a legal right of conscientious objection to military taxation in U.S. courts. The discussion will be held online, on Zoom next Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. EST.
• In South Kivu, the government is striking back at the three-month-old tax strike, announcing that it will call in police to enforce the tax law. Strikers are protesting the lack of road maintenance in the region, and the spokesperson for the strike says it will continue until the main road is repaired.
• Chrissy Kirchhoefer, over at NWTRCC’s blog, recaps some of the Tax Day actions war tax resisters have engaged in this extended tax season.
• War tax resisters in Spain, organized under the Tortuga Antimilitarist Group, have sent letters to various political figures. The letters, accompanied by dried flowers, encourage the recipients to “stop collaborating with their respective institutions or roles in the service of violence and injustice and to join the 2021 war tax resistance campaign.” The flower-bearing messages were meant as a peaceful contrast to letters with death threats and accompanying bullets that were sent to the same figures last month by parties unknown.
• There has been yet more grassroots destruction and disabling of speed cameras in France, Austria, Germany, Italy, and Australia.

The latest news on the tax resistance front:

• The latest tax strike in South Kivu has come to a negotiated end after four days of talks, with the local government agreeing to the strikers’ demands to rehabilitate transportation infrastructure.
• The annual Global Days of Action on Military Spending included some war tax resistance events, particularly in the United States and in Spain — two places where war tax resistance is better-established as a vital part of antimilitarist action.
  • In Biscay, resisters held another food-themed protest at a Treasury building, featuring a cake decorated as Picasso’s Guernica: “No weapons, no bombs, better chocolates, no war!”
  • In the United States, that campaign culminated on Tax Day this year. War tax resisters took action from coast to coast.
  • Ruth Benn reflected on tax resistance during the recent Gaza attacks.
  • And war tax resister Lindsey Britt spoke up in the Brattleboro Reformer.
• Restaurants in Rosario, Argentina have gone on a tax strike, and were soon joined by gymnasiums. The businesses say they cannot afford taxes while they are under Covid-related restrictions that prevent them from operating at capacity.
• The Philadelphia Tribune reminded readers about war tax refuser Eroseanna “Rose” Robinson.
• There’s a roadblock to the Democrats’ plans to use increased IRS enforcement to bring in more money to pay for their ambitious federal budget: The fact that under Congressional budgeting rules, increasing the IRS budget counts as an expense, but increases in tax revenue that might be expected as a result don’t offset that expense. Which means Congress has to jump through extra hoops to justify that extra spending.
  • As part of the proposals, the Biden administration hopes to force banks to report on how much goes into and comes out of their customers’ bank accounts.
  • Republicans smell blood in the water, and suspect that beefing up such IRS tax enforcement might not be politically popular. They hope they can exploit anti-tax-snoop sentiment to stymie Democratic spending priorities.
• The IRS expects to lose 52,000 of its 83,000 employees to retirement over the next six years. Hiring freezes and budget cuts have aged its workforce. But now they’re going on a hiring spree to try to make up for it.
• NWTRCC held another national (on-line) gathering.
• Human attacks on traffic ticket robots took casualties in Réunion, France, and Germany and in France, the U.K., and Spain in recent weeks.
• Tax resistance is on the agenda in South Africa as taxpayers there are increasingly fed up with government corruption.

Tax resistance news in brief:

• I don’t know that there’s much to be gained from watching this sausage get made, but here is a quick sketch: The Biden administration is working on legislation billed as an “infrastructure package” that spends a bunch of money, and tries to raise that money without raising individual taxes on most Americans. One way they hope to raise the money is by boosting spending on tax enforcement (e.g. audits, collections) at the IRS and increasing the agency’s ability to snoop on bank accounts under the theory that this would mean a lot more tax money collected that is currently being left on the table. The legislation is moving forward on two fronts: an ostensibly “bipartisan” version, by which some Republicans would risk the wrath of their party to work with the Democrats in return for helping to shape the legislation, and a unipartisan version if that doesn’t work out, that would have to be rammed through via the Democrats’ razor-thin Congressional majority. However, for reasons that are a mix of fact and fantasy, the Republican base doesn’t much care for the IRS and can pretty easily be riled up to snarl at talk of embiggening it. At first, it looked like the more bipartisan-leaning Republicans would go along with it, but a conservative group has been trying to torpedo the bipartisan infrastructure deal by airing ads attacking those Republicans who looked to be going along with the IRS-boosting part of the plan. And a number of Republicans have spoken out against that part of the plan specifically. So now, that part of the plan seems to be off-the-table in the bipartisan version of the deal. I don’t know how much that matters, as the Democrats may still try to shove something like that through on their own. But they won’t have bipartisan cover to do so, so may be unable to keep their thin majority together.
• Maverick, nay, fully gonzo entrepreneur John McAfee killed himself in a jail cell while awaiting extradition to the U.S. on charges of tax evasion. He had declared his intention to refuse to pay taxes because of his objection to government policies.
• Extinction Rebellion’s “Money Rebellion” tax resistance campaign has published a sample letter that resisters can send to the tax authorities to state their demands and explain their actions.
• The on-again/off-again tax strike in South Kivu over the government’s failure to maintain transportation infrastructure appears to be on again.