Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Myanmar (Burma) →
post-coup resistance, 2021–21
I got another set of eight letters from the IRS today.
It’s the usual set I get around this time every year, with one letter per year I haven’t paid taxes.
The oldest year is missing, as it was last year.
I interpreted that as meaning that the agency had given up on it, and sure enough last year they let it slip past the statute of limitations deadline without collecting.
I’m hoping the same holds this year.
However, there was also a missing year in the middle.
The letters were forwarded from my previous address (I just moved at the beginning of the month), so that might have something to do with it.
(The missing year in the middle arrived a couple of days later; the missing year at the beginning has yet to arrive.
―♇, )
To make a long story short: no surprises here: just their “Annual reminder of balance due taxes” sent inefficiently in separate envelopes because it’s the government.
Recent links from hither and yon:
Tax resistance is heating up in Myanmar in the wake of the military coup there.
The national legislature passed a law suspending tax collection and ordered government departments to stop collecting taxes, though the head of the central tax agency downplayed this.
There are also campaigns afoot to boycott lottery tickets, stop using sales tax stamps, and stop paying government monopoly utility bills.
Consumer pressure forced one restaurant chain to make a public statement that customers were welcome to refuse to pay sales tax in its restaurants.
You can learn more about the Extinction Rebellion U.K. project #MoneyRebellion in its latest newsletter.
Among its projects is Earth Tax Strike — a coordinated tax resistance campaign designed to pressure the government to enact more sensible environmental policies.
Here is an example of a letter the resisters will be sending to the government to explain their refusal and their demands.
The IRS continues to exceed its authority by assessing “frivolous filing penalties” against people who write them letters that protest how their tax dollars are spent — even if those letters aren’t “filings” at all, or are accompanied by filings that are accurate and complete and that don’t assert any “frivolous” positions.
This has understandably intimidated some people from petitioning their government for redress of grievances in this fashion.
Small loss though that may be, Ruth Benn urges us to not roll over too quickly: “if we want to make a statement about refusing to pay for war, hassles come with the territory and are actually the least of the risks that a resister could face.”
The U.S. government has been sending out stimulus payments as direct-deposits, as checks, or as debit cards.
It would do this even if the recipient was behind on their taxes and owed the goverment money: it did not deduct what you owed from the stimulus you received.
If the IRS couldn’t find you, though, or didn’t think you qualified for a payment, there was a backup option: you could apply for the stimulus on your tax return.
However if you did that, the IRS would treat it as any other deduction or credit, and offset it against the taxes you owed.
Which put people who had to use this backup at a disadvantage… or at least it did so until recently:
The IRS now says it will not offset such stimulus credits against federal tax debts.
The IRS, after insisting that it would stick with the April 15th tax filing deadline this year, finally threw in the towel and extended it to .
Part of what convinced them? They are still trying to finish up last year’s returns, and a growing backlog of taxpayer correspondence.
There were also some significant tax changes in the recently-signed stimulus bill (such as big changes to the child tax credit, and exemption of a large hunk of unemployment benefits from taxable income) that threw a wrench into things even as tax filing season was already officially underway.
, honoring those who refuse to participate in their governments’ war-making institutions.
It comes a couple of days before in the United States, and so conscientious objectors to military taxation are appropriately in the news:
“I want to live my values, which includes nonviolence,” said Lindsey Britt of Brattleboro. “Paying for destruction at home and abroad doesn’t fit into that, so I live more simply and refuse to pay a portion of my taxes.”
War tax resister Sue Barnhart has a letter-to-the-editor in the Eugene Weekly. Excerpt:
I have been a war tax resister since the 1970s since I do not want my money supporting murder.
The money I resist to the military I give to local groups that actually help people and the environment.
Now I am also a war tax resister because I don’t want my money supporting the biggest contributor to the burning of our planet: the U.S. military.
War tax resisters Lincoln Rice and Robin Brookes are hosting a discussion group at the upcoming World Beyond War #NoWar2021 conference on :
“War Tax Resistance:
Tax resistance to paying for the military began hundreds of years ago and continues to this day.
Let’s talk about the practicality and efficacy of refusing to pay for war.”
“I’ve decided I won’t pay any tax to the dictators, and that includes electricity.
If police and soldiers ask me, I’ll just tell them I don’t have any money.
I don’t care if they cut off the power to my house,” the resident of Yangon’s North Dagon Township told Frontier. “Most people in my ward who I’ve spoken to say they’re not going to pay either.”
The Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar apparently has a lot of support from within the Ministry of Electricity and Energy, which may make things easier on resisters.
Ko Aung Thu, who lives in the Shwe Lin Ban area of the highly industrialised township, said he had received a bill for but had no intention of paying.
“They killed people right here, in this township,” he said, referring to the security forces’ massacre of more than 50 people on .
“Why should I pay money to a bunch of murderers? I won’t pay any taxes.
If we pay taxes, we’re just supporting murderers.”
A hotel owner in nearby Bagan said he wouldn’t pay either and he expected many others would also refuse.
“I just heard today about how the state lottery isn’t able to run because so few people bought tickets.
I think most people won’t pay their electricity bills, either,” he said.
“We won’t support the dictator… the income from electricity charges is huge and they won’t be able to survive without that money.”
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is spearheading a Democratic Party effort to expand and further empower the IRS.
“I have proposed nearly doubling the funding for the IRS but also making a chunk of their funding mandatory and targeted toward high-income individuals and corporations.”
During site visits to two processing centers, management estimated that 42 percent of 164 devices used by the submission processing functions are unusable and others are broken but still functioning. “IRS employees stated that the only reason they could not use many of these devices is because they are out of ink or because the waste cartridge container is full,” it said.
The report added: “The lack of working printers and copiers affects many different areas of the IRS but has an especially significant effect on the return and income verification services functions” where employees must make copies of tax returns to fulfill requests for tax documents from taxpayers and other institutions.
At one center, though, only three of the 10 devices were working.
The human war on traffic ticket robot cameras continues, with the robots taking casualties in Guadeloupe and France and in Italy in recent weeks.
Some recent tax resistance news of note:
Jane Rogers & Alex Pension from Extinction Rebellion’s “Money Rebellion” tax resistance campaign in the U.K. and José “Cuti” Cutillas from Spain’s Antimilitarista Tortuga war tax resistance movement spoke at the recent NWTRCC national gathering about how tax resistance plays out in their work:
The “Build Back Better Act” as currently proposed includes among its many provisions $498 million for the Department of Justice specifically to prosecute tax evasion, and $80 billion for the IRS (both figures are spread out over ten years).
Both Democrats and Republicans have reason to exaggerate the practical effect of this.
Democrats will insist that this new funding will mean the government can finally pursue fat cat tax evaders, close the tax gap, and result in lots of new tax revenue that will pay for the rest of the spending in the bill.
Republicans will paint a picture of vast swarms of jack-booted thugs running rampant over innocent families and small businesses across the land.
The purportedly nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analyzed the bill and said that according to their calculations, the new IRS funding would lead to less than a third of the increased revenue that the Democrats were trumpeting.
As a result, the bill as a whole will put the government yet further in the red.
I have seen no signs that the IRS bank-account-monitoring proposal will sneak its way back into the bill, despite some Democrats’ hopes.
Myanmar’s shadow Opposition government, the National Unity Government, has urged the public to stop paying for electricity.
In , it said that 97 percent of people in Mandalay and 98 percent in Yangon had done so, costing the regime $1 billion by that point.
For a while now, U.S. taxpayers have been able to access some of their tax records held by the IRS via the agency’s on-line portal.
This required a somewhat onerous process of signing up for an account — a process that’s a bit more invasive and difficult than signing up for a similar account at your bank.
I’ve tried to talk a few war tax resisters through the process because it can be useful to have better visibility into what information the IRS is assembling about you.
But often, they throw up their hands at some point and say it’s not worth it, because it really does seem like more trouble than it ought to be.
The agency says that by , the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me, an online identity verification service that requires applicants to submit copies of bills and identity documents, as well as a live video feed of their faces via a mobile device.
[C]ompleting the process requires submitting at least two secondary identification documents, such as as a Social Security card, a birth certificate, health insurance card, W-2 form, electric bill, or financial institution statement.
After re-uploading all of this information, ID.me’s system prompted me to “Please stay on this screen to join video call.”
However, the estimated wait time when that message first popped up said “3 hours and 27 minutes.”
The income of “closely-held businesses” (Schedule C / pass-through / non-corporately structured) in the United States is taxed at special rates and with special rules, but on the owners’ individual tax returns.
A new report from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center says that these special rules, combined with some clever gaming of the rules and some outright noncompliance, mean that about half of that income goes completely untaxed.
One theory is that youngsters can fall into denial-of-service attacks by firstly playing online games, and then falling into installing mods, hacks, and even remote access trojans to get the upperhand on their gaming rivals.
