Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Italy → anti-austerity, 2012

Tax resisters in Italy aren’t messing around:

A letter bomb blew off part of the finger of Equitalia’s director general in December, and a month later three explosive devices went off outside the agency’s Naples office.

Police battle protesters outside of an Equitalia office.

Equitalia is “a publicly owned company responsible for collecting taxes and fines in Italy” — one of those weird government “privatization” boondoggles, I suppose.

In the last six months there has been a wave of countrywide attacks on offices of Equitalia, the agency which handles tax collection, with the most recent on Saturday night when a branch was hit with two petrol bombs.

Staff have also expressed fears over their personal safety with increasing numbers calling in sick and with one unidentified employee telling Italian TV: “I have told my son not to say where I work or tell anyone what I do for a living.”

Annamaria Cancellieri, the interior minister, said she was considering calling in the army in a bid to quell the rising social tensions.

“There have been several attacks on the offices of Equitalia in recent weeks. I want to remind people that attacking Equitalia is the equivalent of attacking the State,” she said in an interview with La Repubblica newspaper.

Saturday night’s attack took place on the Equitalia office in Livorno and the front of the building was left severely damaged by fire after the bombs exploded. The phrases “Thieves” and “Death to Equitalia” were sprayed onto outside walls.

It came just 24 hours after more than 200 people had been involved in running battles with police outside a branch in Naples which left a dozen protesters and officers hurt.

Meanwhile, a couple of days ago, Italian Justice Department Secretary Andrea Zoppini resigned after having been indicted for tax fraud. The government is trying to press an austerity program of sorts, along with higher taxes and a crackdown on tax evasion.

Among the Italian tax resisters, though something of a lone wolf outlier, is libertarian George Fidenato, who is following the path set down by Vivien Kellems in the U.S. back in . He is refusing to withhold taxes from his employees’ paychecks, saying he doesn’t work for the government and wouldn’t even if you paid him, and his employees’ interactions with the tax office are their own concern.

More tax resistance overseas:

Tax resistance is a time-honored tactic of nonviolent resistance, but it has also been used by movements or individuals that had little interest in holding to nonviolence. History gives us plenty of examples of people violently resisting taxation.

Today I’ll give some examples of attacks on tax offices, many of which were violent or included intimidation by threats of violence.

Bomb threats and “mysterious white powder”-type incidents

Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve kept half an eye on the news for examples of IRS offices being evacuated by explicit bomb threats or suspicious packages. Here are some examples:

  • : “The FBI is investigating after a mysterious white powder was sent to the IRS mail room in Fresno. The discovery forced the mail room to shut down for about three-and-a-half-hours afternoon.”
  • : “A hazardous materials scare forced a huge evacuation Tuesday of the IRS center in southeast Fresno. A mailroom employee thought he was opening a regular letter from a taxpayer. But when he opened it, a white powder spilled all over him.”
  • : “A letter containing a white powder and a note mentioning anthrax forced federal authorities to shut down the mailroom of the Kansas City IRS headquarters.… ‘We do not think this is going to be anthrax or any other biological agent, but we have to treat this to the Nth degree,’ Herndon said, adding that a field test found the substance likely to be talcum powder.”
  • : “Officials have given the ‘all clear’ after a letter containing a suspicious powder was received in the mailroom at the IRS office in the John Duncan Federal Office Building in Knoxville.”
  • : “Someone apparently trying to make a political statement caused a brief stir Tuesday at the Boulder office of U.S. Rep. Jared Polis. … The Boulder Fire Department Hazardous Materials Team responded and opened the envelope. They found a tea bag inside, with a note reading, ‘We the People, .’ ”
  • : “A package of foot powder mailed from a prison ZIP code caused 250 workers to be evacuated Thursday from [the building containing the IRS offices] in the Flair Park area of El Monte.”
  • : “Michelle Lowry… who processes forms for the IRS in Austin, confronts that venom regularly. People slip razor blades and pushpins into the same envelopes as their W-2 forms. They send nasty notes with their crumpled documents. Last year during the height of the Tea Party movement, hundreds of taxpayers included — what else? — tea bags with their returns. And then there’s the weird stuff. ‘Sometimes you’ll see stuff that looks like blood on them,’ said Lowry, who has worked as a seasonal employee for five years. ‘We wear gloves.’ … She’s been through evacuations caused by suspicious items in the mail, such as white powder. (It turned out to be packing material.)”
  • : “A suspicious substance discovered Monday at an Internal Revenue Service building is not hazardous, a U.S. Postal Inspection Service official said. A portion of an office building that houses an Internal Revenue Service mail processing center was evacuated after an unknown substance was found about 11:15 a.m.” “ ‘There was an envelope that appeared to have seeds inside,’ Buttars said. ‘What it was is not known yet.’ ”
  • : “Hundreds of people had to evacuate, and dozens of downtown businesses were disrupted, all because of a suspicious package found near the IRS building — the contents of which were soon found to be harmless.”
  • : “Fox 4 reported that this was the second day in a row that workers had found a suspicious package. On Sunday, a powdery substance was found in an envelope (it wasn’t anything threatening).”
  • : “The FBI is now investigating a discovery at Ogden’s James V. Hansen Federal Building that caused a scare, and the evacuation of more than 200 employees.”
  • : “An inspector at the Fresno IRS noticed a package in the mail room with a suspicious odor. … The Fresno PD Bomb squad was called in and the contents inside the package were an unknown type of feces.”
  • : “Workers at a downtown Oklahoma City IRS building and people inside the Colcord Hotel were allowed to return after police investigated a suspicious package that was found Monday morning.”

And I think a quick Google News archives search would probably show me several other examples that never got on my radar.

Note that in many of these cases, there was no deliberate threat involved, but merely an over-cautious reaction based on previous threats. For example: The tactic of including a tea bag with your tax paperwork as a form of protest alluding to the Boston Tea Party has been a periodic American craze for over sixty years, but nowadays any tea-bag-sized lumps in envelopes are an occasion for a very disruptive evacuation and visit from the hazmat team.

And then there’s this:

  • : “Angry New Zealand farmers are reportedly sending parcels of cattle manure to cabinet ministers in a campaign against a so-called “flatulence tax” on their animals. New Zealand Post said it was treating the campaign “as seriously as cyanide”…”

Actual bombings and other attacks

In addition to these mailed threats and suspicious packages, most of which turn out to be bluffs, there have been cases of indisputably real attacks on tax offices. For example:

  • In , a letter bomb exploded in the hands of the director general of Equitalia, a quasi-private company that handles taxes in Italy. The following month, three bombs went off outside Equitalia’s offices in Naples. In another branch was struck with molotov cocktails. “The phrases ‘Thieves’ and ‘Death to Equitalia’ were sprayed onto outside walls.”
  • two farmers responded to tax officials who were a little too greedy in demanding bribes by emptying three bags of cobras in the tax office. (You can see a video of the cobra attack at this link.)
  • A couple of years back, a fellow named Joe Stack loaded up his small plane with fuel and flew it into the offices of the IRS, torching the building and killing an IRS employee (in addition to himself). National Treasury Employees Union president Colleen Kelley said that after Joe Stack’s kamikaze attack, “there were calls where taxpayers said they were thinking of ‘taking flying lessons’ in the context of an audit or a collection. There are 70 that have been reported.”
  • During the Poll Tax rebellion, “In Cambridgeshire two petrol bombs were thrown at the Poll Tax Headquarters and Anti-Poll Tax slogans were sprayed on the side of the building…”

    • A patrol moves around ruins of the income tax office in Jerusalem after a bomb wrecked the building.

  • , Jewish independence fighters bombed an income tax office in Palestine, killing a constable, and injuring five others. “All employes had been evacuated from the building following a telephone warning 10 minutes before the blast. Police said three Jews, one dressed as an Arab, pushed a bomb-laden, Arab-type delivery cart into the building and fled, after clubbing a Jewish policeman and snatching a rifle from an Arab guard. Police tried to drag the cart from the building, but the rope parted. They said they then detonated the bomb with rifle fire, but ‘miscalculated the charge.’ ”
  • In , the Railway Protection Movement in Sichuan destroyed tax offices there.
  • In St. Claire county, Missouri, in , “a gang of armed men rode into the county seat of Osceola and held tax officials at gunpoint while its members stole all the official tax records. … The gang destroyed the tax records, and that meant that the county had no way of taxing anyone.” A year and a half later: “Around midnight on , an armed gang forced Deputy Treasurer K.B. Wooncott to take its members to the county offices. The gang seized the railroad tax book and escaped into the night.”
  • During the rioting that followed the British parliament’s failure to pass the Reform Bill in , the mob burned the Custom-house and Excise-office, along with many other government buildings.
  • In Hippolyte Taine’s history of the French Revolution, he includes many examples of attacks on tax offices:
    • “the crowd, rushing off to the barriers, to the gates of Sainte-Claire and Perrache, and to the Guillotière bridge, burn or demolish the bureaux, destroy the registers, sack the lodgings of the clerks, carry off the money and pillage the wine on hand in the depôt.”
    • “At Limoux, under the pretext of searching for grain, they enter the houses of the comptroller and tax contractors, carry off their registers, and throw them into the water along with the furniture of their clerks.”
    • “at Aupt and at Luc nothing remains of the weighing-house but the four walls; at Marseilles the house of the slaughter-house contractor, at Brignolles that of the director of the leather excise, are sacked: the determination is ‘to purge the land of excise-men.’ ”
    • “…the windows of the excise office are smashed, and the public notices are torn down…”
    • “During the months of , the tax offices are burnt in almost every town in the kingdom.”
    • “Without waiting, however, for any legal measures, they take the authority on themselves, rush to the toll-houses and drive out the clerks…”
    • “…the pillagers who, on the , set fire to the tax offices…”
    Taine also notes that “in Issoudun after , against the combined imposts[, s]even or eight thousand vine-dressers burnt the archives and tax-offices and dragged an employé through the streets, shouting out at each street-lamp, ‘Let him be hung!’ ”
  • In Naples in , a tax revolt expressed itself with attacks on tax offices: “On one beautiful summer night the custom-house in the great market-place flew up into the air. A quantity of powder had been conveyed into it by unknown hands, and in the morning nothing remained but the blackened ruins.” “the populace proceeded from fruit to stones, put to flight the tax-gatherers and sbirri, crowded into the custom-house, destroyed the table and chairs, set fire to the ruins as well as the account-books, so that soon a bright flame rose up amidst the loud rejoicings of the bystanders.” The archbishop, under pressure from the crowd, “ordered them aloud, and in the presence of all, to pull down the custom-houses”

Nonviolent blockades and occupations

Nonviolent tactics have also been directed at disrupting tax offices. I mentioned the “Free Keene” activists in New Hampshire who were arrested for entering an IRS office and trying to convince the employees there to resign their positions. Here are some other examples:

  • Anti-war demonstrators used handcuffs to lock the doors of an IRS building in Rochester, New York, for about a half hour in .
  • Poll Tax resisters in Glasgow occupied a tax office, and, as the staff retreated, took their places at the walk-up windows. One of the occupiers, John Cooper, remembers: “I just sat down at the desk and said through the glass, ‘Can I help you?’ I says, ‘It’s okay; you don’t need to pay any more, it’s abolished!’ and the guy says, ‘Are you sure?’ I says, ‘I’m positive. You know what I’d do with this money: go and spend it, have a good time.’ He says, ‘You’re having me on.’ I could see the guy was still uncertain, so there was a bunch of pads for phone messages — I ripped one of them off and said, ‘If there’s any bother just send that in to us.’ ”
  • Another group of anti-war activists, including representatives from the War Resisters League and NWTRCC, performed a sit-down blockade at IRS headquarters for about an hour in .

One way to resist taxes — or to resist the sort of property seizure that governments sometimes inflict on tax resisters — is to hide assets so as to remove them from the reach of the tax collector or assessor. Here are a few examples:

  • Charles Merrill, who resisted his taxes as a way of protesting for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in the United States, had an appropriately flamboyant asset-hiding strategy. “I have buried $2 million worth of gold coins in the desert…” he said. “My partner doesn’t even know where it is at. If the IRS allows me to file a joint federal income tax form like any other married couple, the money is there to pay.”
  • Lately, wealthy Italians have taken to avoiding the prying eye of the revenue agent by parking their yachts in foreign Mediterranean ports. As of earlier , some 30,000 berths had gone empty in Italian ports, which not only foiled the tax collector but “cost the Italian economy some $350 million in lost revenues from marina fees and services, and fuel sales.”
  • When Doukhobor refugees in Canada refused to pay school taxes on their farmland, reasoning that since they refused to send their children to wicked Canadian schools, they shouldn’t have to pay for them, they anticipated that the government might resort to seizure and “very thoughtfully lost no time in taking their crops from the land within the Langham school district.”

    • Edward Koryto standing in the rubble that used to be his home

  • Another, more drastic way of keeping the tax collector from your door is to demolish your house. Michigan factory worker Edward Koryto did that in to a home he had spent seven years building from scrap lumber when the tax assessors nearly tripled its assessed value, which raised the property taxes due on it by 150%.
  • I covered the strategy of holding resisters’ property in someone else’s name.
  • Later in this series, I’ll also cover taxpatriatism and mass-migration as a way of fleeing the tax collector, which is a similar strategy, and barricades as a means of keeping assets safe from the tax collector, which is another.

Some international tax resistance news:

Ireland

The Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes continues its tax resistance campaign in Ireland.

The government introduced a set of amendments to the tax that are aimed at quieting the dissent, but campaign spokesman Bill Michael O’Brien says that, “the only change that can save this government is to scrap the property tax completely.”

[C]ompletely scrapping the property tax [would] reflect the reality for the hundreds of thousands of people out there struggling to make ends meet who didn’t pay the household charge last year and have no intention of paying the property tax this year.

Among the escalations in the campaign have been disruptions of council meetings. A few weeks ago, meetings in Dublin, Galway, and Kilkenny were disrupted by protesters — including a member of the European parliament — who were arrested. One protester noted: “The politicians are refusing to listen. They have refused to come to meetings organised by the campaign so it seems we have to bring our voices to them.”

Britain

Defend your home against the bedroom tax.

The government is instituting something its foes are calling the “Bedroom Tax” — essentially a cut in the housing benefit of people who get government assistance in paying their rent, if the government deems their home to be too large for their needs.

In other words, if you have two children and each has their own room, the government may say: why don’t you move into a smaller place and double-up? If you have a spare room, the government may say: you probably should rent that out to a lodger — we’re only going to help you pay for the rooms you need.

The Bedroom Tax affects nearly 700,000 households in the U.K. From , tenants of housing associations & social landlords will be hit by a possible 25% cut in their housing benefit if they under-occupy their home. This means: 1 spare room will see a 14% reduction in housing benefit; 2 spare rooms will see a 25% reduction in housing benefit. Many tenants will be expected to uproot their families, move away from their communities, their support networks and downsize to properties that simply do not exist; those who decide to stay will be constantly battling to make up the shortfall in rent. This should not be a question of move or stay; it should be about refusing to pay the tax full stop.

How the bedroom tax works… This is Buckingham Palace — one of many palaces and residences used by the taxpayer-funded Royal Family. Despite having 240 bedrooms, the bedroom tax will not apply. £15.1 million per year of your taxes is spent maintaining royal palaces. This is the eight bedroom home of Lord Freud, the welfare minister imposing the bedroom tax. The London home, worth an estimated £1.9 million, is essentially capped for Council Tax purposes, meaning he only pays three times as much as someone in a bedsit, worth only one-fifteenth of the value. Official estimates are that 95,000 families will be plunged into poverty due to his “bedroom tax” policy. This is the Hooper family. Two parents and five children live in a four-bedroom council house in Hull. Their disabled daughter has her own room — built as an extension, as her wheelchair doesn’t fit in the box room. They will lose £20 per week due to the bedroom tax as not all children are sharing a room. Now ask yourself, “whose home has too many bedrooms?”

According to The Independent, “Increasing numbers of poor communities are pledging to defy eviction threats amid mounting opposition to the Government’s ‘bedroom tax’, claiming they cannot — and will not — pay higher rents.”

A veteran of the 1980s anti-poll tax movement [Liz Kitching] says she is not going anywhere. “I feel worried, frightened, upset. But at the same time I am proud of the campaign and that does give me a little bit of confidence and hope because we did stop the poll tax. I am not a victim. This is a policy I am fighting back against.”

Spain

In Unfollow, Ariza Elisenda writes about civil disobedience in Spain, including tax resistance. Excerpts (translation mine):

From Conscientious Objection to Tax Resistance

The economist Arcadi Oliveres is president of the Justice & Peace foundation, an organization that supported the first conscientious objectors [to military service]. For 30 years it has promoted war tax resistance; in total there are 3,000 people across the country who refuse to pay the Treasury a portion of their taxes proportional to the Defense budget.

Oliveres gives an example with quantities that illustrate how this action is done: “If you are asked to pay 1,000 euros to the Treasury and during the year you have paid 800, when you make your tax return in June, 200 euros will remain to be paid. Well, if the Defense budget is 5% [of the federal budget], from these 200 you refuse to pay 10 euros. But you want to show that you don’t pay because of your disapproval of military spending and not because you don’t want to contribute. So you make your contribution of 10 euros to a non-governmental organization and ask for the receipt. When you make your tax return, you write a note explaining that you refuse a part of your taxes destined for Defense and provide the receipt from the donation you have made to the non-governmental organization.” What happens next? “If they happen to check your return (because it is proven that they do not check them all) they will send you a letter demanding the 10 euros. You ignore it and then they come back and send another letter in which, in addition to the 10 euros, they require of you 20 more for interest. Further demands follow and finally they will end up seizing the amount that remains from your bank account.”

To end up paying not only the quantity remaining to pay in your tax return, but also the interest, does not discourage Oliveres because “freedoms throughout history never have been given, they have been captured.” He emphasizes that to avoid a year and a half in the army, the pioneering conscientious objectors spent three in jail, and, although the number of people in Spain doing tax resistance can be described as a “lackluster result,” he adds that “it is an educational and pressure tactic.”

When the Fuse Lights…

To violate the rule carries a punishment, normally in the form of a fine. “I understand that people want to take these actions as a type of protest,” explains María Teresa Saez, spokesperson for the Professional Association of Magistrates. “I think it is quite legitimate but has to assume the consequences and this will be implicit in such protest.”

Josep Casadellà was clear that he was doing an act of civil disobedience when he decided not to pay for passing a tollbooth on the road to Barcelona by Girona. Joseph says that “I’ve already paid too long; 43 years paying for some highways doesn’t match up, it cannot be and that’s that.” In he went by car with his son and heard on the radio some statements from the Minister of Development Ana Pastor who said they were going to bail out the highway deficit in Madrid with the income from the highways of Catalonia and elsewhere that were in surplus. Then he denied, but at this moment, he says, he would pass through the tollbooth, and said the now-famous phrase “no vull pagar” (“I don’t want to pay”). They recorded it, posted it on YouTube, and lit the fuse.

Over the following weekends, people imitated Josep and made the same statement. Thus, thousands of refusals to pay the tolls: Something previously unheard of. Although it wasn’t the first time that Josep called for disobedience: the previous year there had been a campaign on Facebook on  — the National Day of Catalonia — for people not to pay tolls. “And I did it myself,” he jokes. Why did it not work then and then yes one month later? “I think that it was the right time,” Josep says. In matters of civil disobedience there needs to be a fuse and a spark, but if there is no explosive there will be no bang. “It was a very particular time, with the crisis on one hand and on the other the media that published it… and all together it pulled the trigger.”

…and the Fuse Fizzles

We followed in Catalona: in different weekends during there have been some 50,000 refusals to pay tolls on the part of 25,000 people, according to the “no vull pagar” platform, and Albertis, the tollbooth operator, made an appeal to the government. Fines of 100 euros began to arrive and the protest deflated. “When I first did the ‘no vull pagar,’ I was conscious that I was breaking a rule, a decree that comes each year with fees to be paid. So I was aware that it was an act of civil disobedience that could result in repercussions against me. Now I don’t know if the people who later refused to pay the toll were also conscious of this,” explains Josep. Fines that, on the other hand, were not legal and that could be appealed since at that time it was considered a contractural infraction and it was the operator, Albertis, and not the Catalan Traffic Service that was responsible for reporting drivers who had not paid the toll. Furthermore, Josep says that so far he has not paid anything because he has been making appeals.

The “no vull pagar” campaign has had an impact, though not in the form that the promoters of the protest would have liked: In the general budget for , the government has changed the law to allow sanctioning, now indeed, of people who refuse to pay a toll. If to this we add the new court fees it is easy to understand the discouragement of even the promoter of the idea, who has opted not to use toll roads. Nevertheless, the campaign continues to brainstorm new demonstrations to maintain the protest. For now they will demand accountability for using the highway code to punish an act, failure to pay, that was not punishable at the time.

Nuanced Disobedience

We resumed the conversation with Martí Olivellas, who tells us that, 40 years after the campaign for conscientious objection [to military service], he is about to launch a new civil disobedience campaign called “A call to civil disobedience for civil rights and against the financial dictatorship.” According to Martí this concerns reviving a campaign made three years ago called “Pledge for fiscal transparency” that included not paying the Treasury and depositing the money in an ethical bank account, until the government could explain with transparency how it was spending the taxes. Now the campaign is resuming but in order to be huge they intend to make their deposit in the Government Depository, an administrative body of the Economic Ministry that is charged with the management and control of securities and deposits that have been made with the Civil Administration. Martí Olivellas says that “you’re not evading. What you say is that the day on which they [the government] have the transparency law, end corruption, and know how to manage our money, I’ll pay my taxes that I have retained in the Depository.” But until then, you are not failing to pay but are retaining the money in an account in the same agency, are we still talking about civil disobedience? “This is a very nuanced action of disobedience and is intended for the general public. But everyone can modulate the risk: for example sending that which you have to pay to the Treasury in an interest-free loan to a social entity that should have received money from the State but has not received it.” And do they think anything will happen next? “We hope so, next 16 February there is a gathering which will finish the outline. And then tax season begins. It is the right moment.” At that time we will see if society is willing, or not ready, to disobey.

Catalonia

Spanish cabinet member José Manuel García-Margallo acknowledged a rising tax resistance sentiment in Catalonia. “Increasingly, Catalan society is noticing that what is ‘sent to Spain’… is ‘sent to Europe’ ” — meaning that instead of the tax dollars going to provide services for Catalonia, they’re being used to pay for European creditor bailouts.

Catalan separatists are trying to keep Catalan taxes in Catalonia, and some have used tax resistance strategies — including paying their federal taxes directly to the Catalan local government.

Chile

Guillermo Durand Cornejo, president of the government-owned mining monopoly Codelco, and a legislative representative, called on Salteños (citizens of Salta, Chile) to refuse to pay a municipal tax, in the wake of property tax increases and new taxes in electricity and water bills.

“Until such time as the mayor gives a response to the people concerning the tax hike, I suggest that you do not pay this month’s municipal tax,” he said. “I call for civil disobedience.”

Cornejo says he views the thirty-day tax strike as a wake up call for the government, and suggests that strikers who restrict their strike to the single month will not be subject to government reprisals.

Italy

Italy’s government is responding to widespread tax evasion by doing spot checks of people who appear to be living large to see if they’ve paid their taxes.

The tactic has a name, redditometro, and it involves a detailed “lifestyle” audit that tips off tax authorities to noncompliance. If the police observe an Italian resident living the high life (for instance, by zooming around in an expensive sports car) they can stop the individual and demand their taxpayer identification numbers, regardless of whether any criminal offense has taken place. The information is conveyed to the tax authorities, the Agenzia delle Entrate, which subsequently audits the driver. On audit, revenue officials ask probing questions about how the taxpayer was able to afford the fancy wheels given their meager reported income.

Nowadays being seen driving a Ferrari isn’t so cool; it has become a glaring audit flag. Ditto for renting a weekend villa in the Tuscan hill country, or applying for membership at a Ligurian yacht club. And don’t even think about heli-skiing at Cortina. Other activities being monitored include shopping for high-end fashion items. So think twice before you hit the Gucci boutique.

Redditometro was approved by Parliament in , but wasn’t widely enforced until . Most Italians don’t like the practice. They find it intrusive. Piero Ostellino, an Italian news commentator, recently told the BBC: “I’m against the Redditometro not because I’m in favor of evading taxes, I don’t think tax collection should be done by trampling on individual liberties.” He then added, “I would like to live in a country where a cardinal can, every month, buy a pornographic magazine without having to explain this to the tax authorities. This is like the former East Germany.”

Greece

Tax resistance continues in Greece, where the government has been raising taxes and reducing government benefits and services.

Despite big tax hikes as part of austerity measures demanded by international lenders, tax revenues fell precipitously in , with the Greek Finance Ministry reporting a 16 percent decrease from , and a loss of 775 million euros, or $1.05 billion in one month.

The numbers could have been worse as the government gained revenues from doubled property taxes and big hikes in income taxes that have hit most Greeks except for tax cheats who continue to largely escape sacrifice or prosecution.

Direct tax revenues increased by about 9 to 10 percent in compared with a year earlier. Given the country’s devastating recession, which has created a record 26.8 percent unemployment and is in its sixth year, the only options left for the government is to collect from tax evaders and improve tax collections, although tax hikes have led to many more Greeks trying to hide their income, statistics showed.

The “Won’t Pay” tax resistance movement is still active. An Athens-area branch of the group is putting up 100,000 posters there to urge people to join an expanded tax strike in .

Meanwhile, the government won a court victory against the tollgate runners. The Greek Supreme Court ruled against Oropos mayor John Oikonomakou who had challenged his €200 fine for running the gate on the grounds that the toll and fine money was being siphoned off by foreign companies rather than being used for road maintenance and traffic safety.

Tollgate raids are continuing in spite of the ruling. Other court challenges are also in progress.

The government has recently also added a €5 tax to medical services, which the movement is urging people to refuse to pay, and offering their legal support to anyone denied service for such refusal.

Some links that have bobbed up in my browser in recent days: