How you can resist funding the government →
other tax resistance strategies →
tax evasion / fraud →
personal tax evasion →
examples
A friend sent me a link to Bureaucrash which seems to be the more edgy, activist face of a too-frequently suit-and-tie American classical libertarian movement.
One of their campaigns is called Tax Slavery Sucks.
It tries to get a new hearing for the standard good arguments against taxation and big government, while keeping a running tab of outrageous things the government is using our money to pay for.
Of course, they have their blind spots too, for instance as they organize what they call counterprotests to advocate for free trade wherever WTO, IMF, FTAA, NAFTA, etc. critics gather.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: they can call them “free trade agreements,” but if you get a bunch of the world’s politicians and tyrants together in a room to talk about setting up a set of rules and bureaucracies to govern world trade, I guarandamntee you “free trade” isn’t going to result.
In my mind, the Tax Evader has a scraggly beard, eats a lot of salt pork and beans, and owns either a copy of Thoreau or some antigovernment tract self-published in Montana.
Just as the Tax Evader doesn’t believe in taxes, he also doesn’t go for showers.
He is suspicious, owns at least one gun and tends to believe the IRS is always sneaking up on him.
His body is gnarled and contorted by the lumps of cash he stores in his mattress.
Because I don’t want to be the Tax Evader, I pay my taxes.
Can it really be that there are people who pay their taxes because they’re afraid that if they don’t they’ll turn into Ted Kaczynski by some sort of bizarre alchemy?
But anyway, the article concerns an interior decorator in San Francisco who seems to make a bundle of money without paying any taxes.
He does this not out of any activist impulse, but merely because he got overwhelmed one year at the complexity of the tax filing process for someone who is self-employed, and procrastinated a little too long and then got intimidated by the increasing size of what he owed and the penalties the IRS was adding to the total.
Interesting to me is that this guy had already been caught by the IRS, but then just decided to blow them off — hiding his assets or keeping them in the form of cash.
It sounds like a high-maintenance technique, at least as difficult to do well as the initial tax forms he blew off, but he’s learned it over the years and he’s sticking to it.
Francisco last visited the IRS .
An agent said to him, “We’d just like to get you back in the system.”
They haven’t contacted him since…
Apparently, it’s pretty simple and low-risk to file fraudulent tax returns claiming that you qualify for thousands of dollars in refunds.
The IRS will cut you a check, then maaaaaybe somewhere down the road they’ll notice something fishy, then maaaaaaybe they’ll catch you, then maaaaaaaaybe they’ll try to get the money back.
No fooling.
Here’s a story about one of the ones they caught up with.
He took in half a million dollars over three years this way — and all he had to do was just to pull the numbers out of his butt.
Nothing fancy.
It was only accidentally, “after federal agents learned that Fisher had cheated a local car dealer out of $1.2 million and used that money to buy gold bars and silver coins,” that the tax fraud was uncovered incidentally to that investigation.
A recent TIGTA audit found out that this sort of fraud is a billion-dollar problem for the IRS.
The agency issued an estimated $1 billion in potentially fraudulent refunds, four times what it originally estimated, and then didn’t bother to further investigate half a million of the returns with discrepancies.
Their Criminal Investigation division tracked down about $189 million of that billion, but left $894 million on the table.
Regular Picket Line readers will know that for the last few years I’ve been neglecting to pay my self-employment taxes (I haven’t owed any federal income tax since ).
Unfortunately the IRS has noticed my delinquency, and on a few occasions has seized what money they’ve been able to locate.
Some people, however, have more luck than I have.
One of them, Barack Obama’s nominee to be Secretary of the Treasury (and thus, überczar of the IRS) Timothy Geithner, failed to pay $34,000 worth of self-employment tax .
And in his case, apparently, the IRS mostly looked the other way.
He probably would have gotten away with it, were it not for the extra scrutiny brought to bear after his nomination.
The IRS discovered the missing self-employment taxes for two years, but waived the penalties (anyone you know get such nice treatment?).
But apparently this didn’t make Geithner or anyone else curious about the other two years in which he didn’t pay self-employment taxes.
So a few days before his nomination was announced he finally got around to paying off the rest (no penalties, natch), and all the folks in the halls of power are murmuring “honest mistake” and waving questions aside.
Voluntary Pauperism is Vicki Robison’s term for leaving the rat race, reprioritizing, and staying under the tax line.
“I decided that the only way to avoid contributing to the corruption of government as I saw it, was to not pay into the system.”
She says there’s a respectable and a disrespectable way to go about it, and gives some examples.
The IRS sends out an enormous number of “refund” checks (something like 122 million of them last year, for instance), and all you have to do to get one is to fill out a form with the right numbers on it.
To some folks, this is like setting out a huge trough of money with a little sign next to it saying “honor system.”
For instance, according to “authorities” some fraudsters in Tampa, Florida, hauled in hundreds of millions of dollars this way (which is still, “just the tip of the iceberg,” say they).
The fraud — known in street vernacular as “drops” or “Turbo Tax” after the online filing system — is so pervasive that local police say it even had an effect on street crime, temporarily reducing the numbers of street-corner drug dealers, who found it easier to make money in front of laptop computers in their homes.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Remember that Litopia After Dark podcast I was on a few days back?
Co-host Peter Cox tried to spark some controversy by calling war tax resistance an “elitist” stand.
I wasn’t quite sure what he was going on about, but I think he was implying that it’s elitist to prioritize your own ethical limits on how you want your money spent over the government’s determination of where it thinks people’s money should be spent (particularly, perhaps, when the government has some degree of democratic legitimacy).
Erica Weiland responds at War Tax Talk to the question: “Is War Tax Resistance Elitist?” …and wonders if some people are afraid of becoming better people because they don’t want others to think of them as “holier than thou.”
Have you got any protest plans ?
If so, NWTRCC wants to know about it.
They compile a list of such actions for their annual Tax Day press release, which can help you get a little more buzz.
In a fairly repulsive bit of political theater, Congress is raking the IRS over the coals for its use of civil forfeiture to seize money from people without convicting them — or even charging them — with a crime.
What makes this repulsive is that it’s Congress that designed the civil forfeiture authorization, fully intending that it be abused in this way.
It’s entirely in their power to pass a less-unjust law, but they chose to pass a more-unjust one instead… and now they pretend to be champions of civil liberties, pontificating about how unfair the IRS is being by using the law as it was designed.
Not long ago the news was full of interest about Facebook gazillionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to launch a new enterprise dedicated to making the world a better place, and his decision to fund it with 99% of the Facebook shares he owns: about $45 billion worth. Cynics were quick to see this as a tax dodge.
It’s not obvious to me that the tax advantages are quite as enormous as some are making them out to be, but even so, as Simon Black points out, if Zuckerberg managed to avoid taxes on any of that $45 billion, that alone would contribute to making the world a better place!
Jason Rawn, at NWTRCC’s blog, urges climate change activists to divest from the Pentagon to fight the single biggest contributor to fossil fuel consumption.
NWTRCC is again collecting names for its War Tax Boycott.
If you’ve signed on in the past and you’d still like to be considered part of the boycott, sign on again as they’ve started with a clean slate.
