Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
United States →
D.C. statehood, 1955– →
Walter E. Fauntroy
Remember how former District of Columbia council member Carol Schwartz threatened to start resisting her federal income taxes over the lack of Congressional representation for people in the district?
Well, that didn’t last long.
When tax time rolled around, she backpedaled and paid up.
But since then I’ve found another example or two.
First, this one, from , from a woman with a bit more fortitude:
“Boston Tea Party” Needed, She Says; Cooking Up Scheme
by Alicia Hart
Daisy Harriman
Washington — (NEA) —
The days of crusading women suffragists are not yet dead.
That is if Daisy Harriman has her way.
A tradition here in the capital, this grand old gal is outraged that the citizens of Washington, both male and female, have no right to vote either in local or national elections.
So she’s waging a red hot no-holds campaign to get Congress to rectify this situation.
If going to prison will help the cause, then Mrs. J. Borden Harriman is game.
In fact, she’s presently cooking up a scheme that could put her back in the clink any one of these days.
Mrs. Harriman served as U.S. Minister to Norway during the critical years prior to World War Ⅱ.
She is a distant cousin of Gov. W. Averell Harriman of New York.
After years of civic and social activity, political squabbles, hair raising experiences and close friendships with the great and near great, she’s in no mood to call it quits.
A mere 84, she makes ridiculous the conventional idea that old ladies should stick to their rocking chairs.
Wake Up People
“We’ve got to do something spectacular that will wake people up to the fact that Washington is voteless,” exclaims Mrs. Harriman who is cochairman of the Washington Home Rule Committee and a power behind the drive to give the District of Columbia its own government.
“It’s so hard to get anyone excited over it.
Why most people in the country don’t even realize we can’t cast a ballot here.”
The best way to dramatize voteless Washington, Mrs. Harriman figures, is to refuse to pay D.C. taxes until something is done.
So far, she has persuaded about 10 persons to go along with the plan.
They’ll sign a paper notifying officials of their position.
“We need another Boston Tea Party,” she says.
“It’s the same situation — taxation without representation.
Washington is the only great capital in the free world where the people have absolutely no say as to how their government is run.
It’s a disgrace.”
Such a skirmish with the law could put Mrs. Harriman and anyone else behind bars.
Some of her more cautious friends have advised against such a step.
“I’d be perfectly willing to go to prison,” she comments as if referring to a coming engagement.
“I think it would be fun.”
In she was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as Minister to Norway.
The second woman in U.S. history to take on such a diplomatic post, it seemed to be a harmless spot where a female could hardly gum up international relations.
But Hitler changed that.
When the Germans attacked Norway in , she was on the spot, and her dispatch to the State Department sounded the alarm.
Then 70, she stuck out air raids until finally forced to flee to Sweden with the Nazi armies close behind.
She has also been through plenty of political battles and is a staunch Democrat ever since taking up the banner for Woodrow Wilson in .
Soon after his election, she was made the only woman member of the Federal Industrial Relations Commission.
Perhaps Daisy Harriman’s Sunday evening suppers won her the greatest fame, especially in Washington circles.
Here again, there were fireworks.
New Dealers and right wingers from the ranks of Congress, the newspaper business and government were placed side by side at her table.
Then she’d throw out for conversation a sizzling topic of the day.
When her guests got too hot under the collar, she could always cool them off with one sentence.
It was: “Isn’t this all great fun?”
The District of Columbia finally got its own, locally-elected government in , though it is subject to whatever arbitrary mandates Congress decides to throw over it from time to time, and it has turned out to be a particularly crappy government.
The residents of the district still have no full-fledged Congressional representation.
In , the non-voting District delegate to Congress, Walter E. Fauntroy…
That would risk penalties including imprisonment.
“Those of us who have decided to take this action are prepared to accept those consequences,” Fauntroy said .
Fauntroy… asked city residents to file federal tax returns but withhold payment of federal taxes and place the money in an escrow account to be established by a group called “Taxation Without Representation Committee.”
Fauntroy vowed to continue the protest until a D.C. statehood bill is passed by Congress.
The bill, considered a long shot to pass, would make the city a state and give city residents their first voting representation in Congress — two senators and one member of the House.
“Like all Americans, the people of Washington, D.C., are not different when it comes to sharing the burden of taxation,” Fauntroy said.
“Indeed, district residents pay more taxes per capita than the residents of every state in the union except one, Alaska.”
He said all records of tax returns and payments would be sealed, and he hopes to get $1 million in unpaid taxes into the account.
Jan Eichhorn, a longtime statehood activist who plans to withhold her federal tax payment, said the protest could affect the struggle for statehood.
“The only way we’re going to get statehood is the way we got home rule: by appealing to the voters of other states,” said Eichhorn, a D.C. government employee.
“If this is organized well, it can have an impact.”
Fauntroy, who for several years has waged an unsuccessful effort to achieve statehood for the district, said he would like to see $1 million in withheld tax payments made to the corporation.
He first began planning the protest late last year.
To preserve taxpayer confidentiality, data about individual contributions to the fund would be sealed, Fauntroy said.
He added that James M. Christian, a lawyer with the firm of Laxalt and Washington, had offered legal assistance to participants in the Fauntroy plan.
Fauntroy said the tax protest “will heighten the moral impropriety” of the district not having statehood and “prick the conscience” of those in Congress and other parts of the country who oppose statehood.
Governments spend a lot of time and energy, and hire a host of political scientists and other such clergy, to try to convince their subjects that paying taxes is not only mandatory, but that it’s honorable, dignified, and charitable, and that conversely, failure to pay taxes is underhanded, shady, and selfish.
So governments and other critics of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns are quick to deploy this available propaganda lexicon in their counterattacks.
This can have the effect of putting the resisters on the defensive, message-wise.
One way some resisters and resistance campaigns have tried to defuse this is through the use of escrow accounts.
The idea here is that instead of paying taxes to the government, the resister or resisters will pay their taxes into a special account that they will relinquish to the government at a future date if the government meets their demands.
The message conveyed by this is that “we are willing to pay our share of money for the government’s upkeep — we’re not just keeping the money for ourselves — but we’re not going to do so until the government shapes up.”
Here are some examples of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns that have used this technique:
In , Samoan chiefs met and decided to pay their taxes not to the German imperialist government, but to officers who were authorized to hand the money over to the Germans only if “a satisfactory settlement has been arrived at.”
In , a group of Catholic war veterans in Queens, New York began paying their property taxes into an escrow fund that they said they would refuse to turn over to the local government until it fired a Communist Party member from his post as a government advisor.
In New Guinea, in , natives in the Mataungan Association, upset at their political control being diluted in a local government that included immigrant representatives, set up its own tax agency and collected $29,000 “which, it says, it is holding in trust until the council reverts to its old native-only status.”
In the Friends Meeting at Cambridge established a “Peace Tax Fund” that worked partially as a redirection fund, but which also anticipated that some contributors would want to release the funds to the government if the government provided a way to do so that would not make them complicit in military spending.
Ed Guinan resisted his small business’s taxes by sending the checks to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. “They return it with a polite note saying that they cannot accept it, and we put it into a tax escrow account which cannot be used for normal business expenses.”
In , the Nashua Area War-Tax Resistance Support Group decided to keep the withheld taxes of its members in escrow “to be given to the government when policies change and when the money will be used for purposes other than war.” Resisters could reclaim their money from the fund if the IRS seized money from them individually, and meanwhile the interest earned in the account would be given to charitable causes.
New England War Tax Resistance set up three funds — a mutual insurance “penalty fund,” a “Direct Giving Fund” for resisters who wanted to immediately redirect their taxes, and an escrow fund which would hold on to resisters’ money in case they at some future point decided they wanted to settle with the IRS.
The Purchase Quarterly Meeting of Quakers set up something called the “Peace Tax Escrow Account” to which resisters could deposit their refused taxes and which the Meeting said it would turn over to the government if the government gave taxpayers a mechanism to pay such taxes without paying for the military functions of government.
In , District of Columbia politician Walter Fauntroy, upset at the District’s lack of political representation at the federal level, “asked city residents to file federal tax returns but withhold payment of federal taxes and place the money in an escrow account to be established by a group called ‘Taxation Without Representation Committee.’ ”
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers lost a court battle in which the IRS hoped to force them to withhold taxes from a war tax resisting employee. They began withholding the taxes as ordered, but rather than submitting them to the IRS, they put the withheld money into an escrow account and told the agency they’d have to seize it themselves.
In , the Chamber of Commerce in Tijuana, Mexico decided to withhold taxes in protest against inadequate security during a crime wave there. The group brought in accounting consultants to help them establish an escrow account, in the hopes that the gesture would discourage the government from classifying the member businesses as tax delinquents.
In , New York state assemblyman Greg Ball encouraged his constituents not to pay their Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax but to instead deposit the amount due into an escrow account which would not be relinquished until the Metropolitan Transit Authority were audited and reformed.
In , shopkeepers in San Juan, Argentina, protesting against competition from untaxed and unregulated street vendors, began paying their taxes into a fund that they say they will only relinquish to the government when it begins to crack down on the street vendors.
In , Markus Zwicklbauer, a 58-year-old tax consultant from Fürstenzell, Germany, began paying his taxes instead into an escrow account which he says he will release to the government if the government can show him to his satisfaction that it will be spent for the benefit of German citizens and not wasted on bailouts of other Eurozone nations.
A bar owner in Michigan in , struggling in the wake of an indoor smoking ban that discouraged her customers, organized a tax protest of similarly-situated businesses that involved paying taxes into escrow.
