Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Argentina → in 2012–14

More tax resistance rumblings in Argentina. (Excerpts, my translation:)

In San Martín, Avellaneda and a number of industrial suburbs, chambers of commerce and industry feel pressure from their members who in one way or another are being punished by import restrictions and the customs snare. What do these active sectors of the economy propose as a form of protest? They ask to join in a variety of tax revolt, not to pay taxes while the status quo persists and until the restrictions that paralyze commercial and industrial activity are readdressed. Something like the example of bloodless revolution that Mahatma Gandhi led to get decolonized by the British Empire in 1947.…

The concept of the “global village” means that when a customs office is closed, almost like falling dominoes the rest will follow. This is what Argentina faces, and for this reason [government economist Axel] Kicillof strikes fear into [Argentine president] Cristina Fernández by trying to prove to her that the brutal policy of [Secretary of Domestic Trade Guillermo] Moreno may lead to a considerable drop in tax revenue. Everyone knows that a rebellion against the payment of taxes does not always have to be trumpeted from the rooftops. Simply with agreement among thousands of companies to stop, and to the State it is impossible to hunt down all of the activists together because soon there is no infrastructure with which to do so.

In Zona Norte [a region of Buenos Aires], the proposal is to restrict the payment of federal taxes but to meet municipal obligations. There are at least two strong districts whose mayors endorse this proposal: San Isidro and Tigre. It is a little as though the shock wave of the “Moreno effect” were spreading.

The article also notes that people are ignoring the official, legally-obligatory exchange rate of the Argentine peso — with realtors, for example, defiantly listing properties in dollars. “The official dollar,” the article notes, “is like Santa Claus: sweet and good, but not real.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Budget cuts are forcing the IRS to close its doors and send its employees home without pay several days this year.
• David Cay Johnston notes that this is just the continuation of a long trend of reduced IRS budgets: “This fiscal year, the IRS will spend 20 percent less per capita in real terms than it did in 2002,” he says. “That means a lot of tax money is being left on the table because the IRS lacks the resources to identify cheats, to pursue those who owe taxes, and to make cases the Department of Justice can prosecute.”
• US News & World Report has a curious but frustratingly vague report about how the IRS is going to be using those emerging megadatabases of consumers’ behavior — such as those generated by web trackers, credit cards, and customer loyalty programs (“but with the added advantage of access to Social Security numbers, health records, credit card transactions, and many other privileged forms of information that marketers don’t see”) — in its own investigations.
• La Arena has a brief article about “a violent act and its cover-up.” The violent act in question came when someone fired 23 shots into a vehicle carrying tax inspectors in the Entre Ríos province of Argentina (the inspectors were saved by their paperwork-filled briefcases). The cover-up went something like this:

  The violent attack happened, the police quickly identified the aggressor and raided his home, where they found a small arsenal of weapons of war — it is not clear if they were registered. They also found proof in his truck of recently-fired gunpowder residue. With these (and other) details the case merited at least preventative detention, but the prosecutor [Juan Sebastián Blanc] intervened in spite of the overwhelming evidence from the attack, putting the attacker at liberty, judging that there was not sufficient evidence for such a determination.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Tax Day has come and gone, and NWTRCC is collecting a list of war tax resistance actions that happened on or around that day. Here’s a photo of Juanita Nelson holding her “Haven’t Paid Taxes Since 1948” sign in front of the Brattleboro post office on Tax Day.
• The Chief Counsel of the IRS Criminal Tax Division issued something called a Search Warrant Handbook a few years back to give its Criminal Investigation personnel with guidance about when they need search warrants to do their investigations. The Handbook stated:

  [T]he Fourth Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution, governing searches and seizures] does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.

  and

  [E]mails and other transmissions generally lose their reasonable expectation of privacy and thus their Fourth Amendment protection once they have been sent from an individual’s computer.

  A copy of the Internal Revenue Manual issued that year also says that “the government may obtain the contents of electronic communication that has been in storage for more than 180 days” without going through the hassle of obtaining a search warrant. Other agency memos, dating as recently as October 2011 restate the position.
  
  When the ACLU exposed these policies, there was a bit of an uproar. The agency didn’t help matters much by issuing a non-denial denial:

  Respecting taxpayer rights and taxpayer privacy are cornerstone principles for the IRS. Our job is to administer the nation’s tax laws, and we do so in a way that follows the law and treats taxpayers with respect. Contrary to some suggestions, the IRS does not use emails to target taxpayers. Any suggestion to the contrary is wrong.

  But the acting head of the IRS appeared before a Senate committee yesterday and seemed to indicate that the agency would back down, at least somewhat, and at least until the fuss dies down.
• The IRS is also catching flak for its ineptitude in dealing with identity theft. The USA Today editorial board concluded that “the crooks appear to be one step ahead of the IRS” as the IRS has responded to the growing problem by expanding its bureaucracy in a way that made things more complicated without making it more effective. In one example, a study of 17 people who had filed identity theft complaints with the IRS showed that the agency had responded by opening 58 distinct and uncoordinated cases in its myriad subunits in response.
• None of this is coming at a convenient time for the tax agency. The acting Commissioner, Steven Miller, recently appeared before the House Appropriations Committee to beg them not to cut the IRS budget any more. Miller “explained that the budget cuts that the IRS must make on account of sequestration will reduce IRS enforcement levels. In the short-term, revenue will drop because the number of audits will drop and collection activity will decline. In the long-term, the diminishing presence of the IRS will cause the voluntary compliance rate to drop, further reducing revenue.”
• Harriet Bicksler wrote an interesting piece — “Gambling on the Rapture” — about her on-again/off-again experiments with war tax resistance.
• The Mesa de Enlace Agropecuaria (Agricultural Liaison Bureau) in Argentina met in Santa Fe to decry encroaching “Marxism and Chavezism” in the country, and to call for tax resistance: “pay no taxes until June so the government cannot pay the bonuses and treat itself to a good time.”
• The American Enterprise Institute has issued a new edition of their useful compendium of poll results: Public Opinion on Taxes: 1937 to Today.

A couple of bits of international tax resistance news:

• The destruction of automatic traffic monitors in Brittany and other parts of France as part of the anti-tax bonnets rouges movement is also being accompanied by less-destructive but almost as effective temporary disabling of these monitors by affixing stickers over their “eyes.”
• In El Ojo Digital, Dr. Guillermo Enrique Avogadro called for tax resistance against the Argentine government of Cristina Kirchner. Excerpt (my translation):

  …in the spirit of constitutional revolution — a role that I assume with responsibility — I hereby propose that we attack this nefarious regime at its most essential front, tax collection (#NoPagoImpuestos). If we agree to stop paying taxes, as the Americans in Boston did with tea, we can force Congress to address the leadership vacuum the country finds itself in, and, with this, we can put an end to the imperial family and to its band of corrupt and genocidal criminals. If we do not, if we continue to play the role of sheep willing to work as slaves so that the President and her lackeys continue to fill their gorged saddlebags, that they squander on houses, planes, vacations, Football for All, Argentine Airlines, etc., we will have no future as a nation and Argentina will cease to exist.

  But instead, if we were to do like Gandhi in India, who peacefully managed to banish the British Empire and its local proconsuls, if we were to make real that civil resistance, the Government, underfunded, would be unable to continue its irrational policy of buying obedience and stealing the very plumbing out from under the nation, and, when the consequences of our joint conduct produces the final collapse of this sinister decade, all of those responsible, whether in government or private citizens, will end in paying the bill for this party with their liberty and their ill-gotten fortunes; something that is being proclaimed in this sense, by the permanent “escraches” that they are subjected to whenever they try to poke their heads out of their burrows, something that did not happen under previous governments.

I’ve been slacking a bit in my reporting, but a lot has been coming across my screen in recent weeks:

War Tax Resistance News

• Erica Weiland penned a thoughtful piece on War Tax Resistance as Self-Care at NWTRCC’s blog. Excerpt:

  Some resisters describe war tax resistance as something they do so they can live with themselves, or something they do to assuage their conscience about where tax money goes. Being able to live in alignment with your beliefs is a profound form of self-care — think about the dis-ease you experience when you do something against your beliefs. War tax resistance not only brings you into alignment with your beliefs about war, it can also help you integrate your beliefs on other issues.

• The Global Day of Action on Military Spending is right around tax day (April 15) again this year, and the coalition is making plans for a variety of protest actions.

U.S. Tax Law News

• If you’re self-employed as a sole proprietorship in the U.S., you’re supposed to pay self-employment tax on all of your profits, just as though you were employed and it was your salary. But if you’ve organized yourself as an “S Corporation” — you can instead pay yourself a specific salary out of your profits and you’ll only owe self-employment tax on that. Seems an arbitrary and even sketchy loophole? Tax expert Peter J. Reilly says it’s “a valid self-employment tax avoidance strategy… organizing as an S Corporation and avoiding self-employment tax seems like a no-brainer for a sole proprietor” though he also warns that “you really should not use the strategy to avoid SE/payroll taxes entirely.”
• NPR looked into Why More Americans Are Renouncing U.S. Citizenship and concluded that there isn’t one single cause, but instead it is the result of “dominoes falling, one after another, leading to an unexpected outcome.” But all of the dominoes have to do with taxes, and how the U.S. tax system makes life difficult for citizens living overseas.

Tax Resistance in Spain

• Professor Roberto Centeno, writing at El Confidencial, made a bit of a stir by arguing that since much of the Spanish government debt is not legitimate, the people of Spain do not owe it and ought not to pay for it through their taxes. Excerpts:

  Following the marvelous example of civil dignity that Henry David Thoreau gave us with the practice of disobedience against unjust taxes, created and used against the interest of the citizens, now more than ever it has become indispensable to put an end to the particracy of lies and corruption. And to do this by means of an exemplary action of tax withholding against the enrichment without reason of the political and financial oligarchs, by means of those taxes created and a debt assumed to defend their interests, and so it will be them who reassume this debt or answer for the consequences of its nonpayment.

  It is a debt of the regime, a personal debt of the government that contracted it, because it does not comply with the essential requirements of a legitimate debt, which would be that it was contracted for the exclusive benefit of the people.

• Meanwhile the number of towns in Catalonia that have stopped paying their taxes to the federal government, sending them to the regional government instead has risen to 54. This is currently only a sort of quasi-tax-resistance, as the regional government dutifully forwards these taxes to the central government, but it is part of a strategy of strengthening the regional tax agency in anticipation of eventually making the buck stop there in “the transition to statehood.”

Tax Resistance in France

• Yes, they’re still burning “ecotax” portals in Brittany. The latest one was partially burned on the night of the 5^th, which damaged it enough that the authorities ordered it to be removed.

A Look Back at the Poll Tax Resistance Campaign

• Chris Robinson has published a series of reminiscences of the campaign against the poll tax that brought down Thatcher’s reign in Great Britain:
  1. The Anti-Poll Tax Campaign
  2. A Paler Shade of Red
  3. Get Militant
  4. Revolution Down Below
  5. The Wall Comes Tumbling Down
  6. The Art of Self-Defence
  7. Demo
  8. Victory
• I also found some archives about the poll tax resistance effort at an Anarchist Communist Federation website.

Tax Resistance in Greece

• The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement won’t quit either. Thousands of Greeks marched at Afidnes and raised the toll gates there last month.

Tax Resistance in the Dominican Republic

• I feel like I have way too little context to make sense of all of this, but various industrial and commercial unions are squabbling over whether to support a business strike in the Dominican Republic over the expansion of a value-added tax there.

Tax Resistance in Argentina

• Last month, twenty “productores, industriales forestales, empresas de servicios, y colonos” (roughly: “manufacturers, foresters, service businesses, and farmers,” I think) in Colonia Delicia decided to stop paying taxes in protest at the poor state of the government-maintained roads. The businesses say that the poor condition of the roads is making their businesses impossible to operate.

Tax Resistance in Great Britain

• “A mother of three is so incensed by the Isle of Man’s new sewerage charge she has pledged to go to prison rather than pay it.”