How you can resist funding the government → other tax resistance strategies → Constitutionalist tax protest stuff (“show me the law!”)

Reason magazine has a good article, sympathetic and skeptical at the same time, about the weird constitutionalist tax protest movement:

At the conference you learn that taxing violates our natural rights; and anyway, the Constitution does not permit an unapportioned direct tax like an income tax; and if you think the 16^th Amendment took care of that, well, it wasn’t properly ratified; and even if it was, it didn’t give any new taxing powers to Congress; and even if it did, the statutes and codes of the IRS as written aren’t officially U.S. law; and even if they were, they don’t define liability and income such that any normal working American owes taxes; and anyway, if you just don’t file they might never catch you.

As I mentioned a while back, I’m putting together a “tax resistance reader” with historical examples of writing by and about tax resistance in its various forms.

I wanted to include at least one example from the American “Constitutionalist” tax protester movement. Although it is a different sort of egg than the conscientious or tactical tax resistance examples that are the main focus of the reader, it is a surprisingly large and influential movement, and one that occasionally mixes with the contemporary American war tax resistance movement.

The Constitutionalist tax protesters say that the federal government is exceeding its Constitutional authority in the way it taxes Americans, particularly in the case of the income tax — that there is no law, or no Constitutional law, or no valid law, or something of that sort, that requires us to pay a tax on our incomes. They typically hope that the federal court system will see things their way (though the courts rarely if ever do) but, at the same time, are so convinced by their understanding of the Constitutional limits on government that court cases to the contrary usually neither convince nor deter them.

It’s a charming faith in a sort of Platonic Constitution as it ought-to-be (or, often, a fantasy nostalgia for the Constitution of an imaginary past). At its best, it asserts a citizen’s prerogative to the superior share of responsibility for running the republic and restraining its government that is a frequent theme in democratic political theory. But at its worst, it’s a bunch of bizarre mumbo-jumbo and cargo cult legal blather.

Most of the contemporary tax protester literature is devoted to an intricate analysis of a legal framework that exists nowhere on Earth, but only in an imaginary world. It’s a bit like watching people play role-playing games in which they become space captains or World War Ⅱ generals or sword-wielding elves, only in this game they become lawyers.

Baroque and fascinating as these arguments can sometimes be, they’re also pretty dumb — and quickly anachronistic, as new “can’t miss” Constitutional or “common law” arguments are advanced by a new generation of tax protesters, to replace the ones that failed for the last set. Each new generation of arguments requires a deeper dive into the arcana of obscure court opinions, old lawbooks, and bizarre logical constructions.

I hoped to find an example of the genre that was more straightforward and sparing on the mumbo-jumbo. For this, I went back to Vivien Kellems, a fascinating woman and one whose tax resistance in defense of her version of the Platonic Constitution serves as an exemplar of the American Constitutionalist tax protester phenomenon.

The trick was to find some of her writing and get permission to include it in my reader.

Kellems wrote about her tax resistance in a book called Toil, Taxes and Trouble, that was published by E.P. Dutton in 1952. E.P. Dutton was later absorbed by the Penguin Group. Their permissions department says that the rights to the book reverted to the author, who was represented by Curtis Brown Ltd. However, a representative of Curtis Brown told me they don’t represent Kellems’s work any longer, and didn’t have any leads for me.

My understanding is that a book that was published in 1952 went into the public domain if its copyright registration wasn’t renewed by the end of 1980. So my next step was to try to find out if the registration was renewed, and if so, by whom. I checked the on-line database at the U.S. Copyright Catalog (which covers copyrights registered after 1978), and I even checked through the full, pre-1978 database (which is huge, hard to track down, and only recently available to the public). There’s no sign of Kellems’s book in either database. So, I’m going to go on the assumption that Toil, Taxes and Trouble is now free-for-all.

You can find Kellems’s speech in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

And, in that spirit, and from that book, here’s a transcript of the speech Kellems gave to the Los Angeles Rotary Club on 13 February, 1948, to announce that she was going to stop withholding taxes from the paychecks of her employees:

“And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city.”

It has frequently been said that history repeats itself, and today, we are witnessing a repetition of the act of Caesar Augustus two thousand years ago. It all began in 1913, when we issued a decree “that all the world should be taxed,” every man in his own city. For in that year we adopted the Sixteenth Amendment to our Constitution:

“The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on income from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

And when we adopted this income tax amendment, we departed from our constitutional method of taxation.

For one hundred and twenty-five years, the Federal Government had levied taxes and they were always apportioned among the several States. Why do you suppose the Constitution is so specific and so explicit that Federal taxes shall be uniform and apportioned among the States? For one reason only. Our forefathers were determined to build a republic, with equal opportunity and equal responsibility for each and every one of us. They knew that the power to tax is the power to destroy, and they did not wish to have one group of citizens, or one part of the country penalized for the unfair advantage of another.

How wise and farsighted they were! For one hundred and twenty-five years this was our traditional, constitutional system of taxation, and under it we built the richest, most powerful nation in the world. We developed and maintained for the majority of our people, a standard of living, undreamed of in any other country, the hope and envy of all the world.

And then what happened? We chucked our proved system of taxation out the window, and we passed the income tax. Gone was our uniformity, gone was our apportionment among the States. And with uniformity and apportionment went a great deal more — our fundamental American rights. At first, we started with a tiny little one per cent on all incomes. That being more or less painless, we raised it to 2 per cent. And then 5 per cent, and then 10 per cent, and then 20 per cent, and then 50 per cent, and up and up and up to 90 per cent and in 1943, due to that clever so-called 75 per cent forgiveness trick, some citizens in this country were taxed more than 100 per cent of their incomes. Is it a tax or is it confiscation?

But that isn’t all. Being so intrigued with the income tax, we decided that if one tax is good, two are better and we proceeded to pass the capital gains tax which slapped business right in the face and sent it reeling into the corner. And to salt it down, we added the idiotic capital stock tax. And still not satisfied, we made sure that every dividend should pay two taxes — one by the corporation and another by the stockholder, if and when he got it. And right in the middle of this tax orgy, we elected an Administration that made a wonderful discovery: The world was its little oyster to open.

Up to this point we thought we had done pretty well, but we soon realized we were just pikers. Taxes? We didn’t know the meaning of the word, but we soon found out that the New Dealers did. Taxes? A new one every day or two! They rained upon us as the gentle dew from Heaven. “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect,” quoth the delighted Harry Hopkins. Soak the rich in Illinois, or New York, or Connecticut and buy some votes in Oregon or Nevada or wherever they are needed. The formula worked like magic for political purposes but it threw our country into the deepest and most tragic depression of our history. The depression of the 1930’s was a tax depression. Business simply could not function. It took a world-wide war, billions of dollars, and the precious lives of thousands of our boys to pull us out of it.

But with the adoption of the income tax, we lost something more precious than uniformity and apportionment among the States. Let us go back to our Fourth and Fifth Amendments: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated…” and “…no person shall be compelled to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

These two Amendments insured to the citizens of the United States the right of privacy. It was ours in every sense, until the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, but with the income tax, we lost this precious right. If I say, “No,” you cannot come into my house without a search warrant, and before you can secure such a warrant, you must advance good and sufficient cause for searching my house. But the Income Tax Inspector can come into my home or yours. In the name of the Income Tax, the Federal Government can search and seize every paper you own, it can force you into court, to be a witness against yourself, and if you are not able to pay the tax, it can sell you out, lock, stock and barrel. The Income Tax is the strongest weapon ever placed in the hands of an unscrupulous government, and as long as that Amendment is a part of our Constitution, our freedom is in jeopardy. Our right to privacy, so carefully insured to us by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, has vanished.

But taxes are like strong drink. They grow upon you. If income taxes are good for some of us, they must be good for all of us. If one citizen is to pay an income tax then every person who has an income should also pay his proportionate share. With which conclusion I agree. But I disagree with the premise — I don’t think an income tax is good for anyone, the taxpayer or the Government.

But this time we really did a job. Under the hypnosis of war hysteria, with a pusillanimous Congress rubber-stamping every whim of the White House, we passed the withholding tax. We appointed ourselves so many policemen and with this club in our hands, we set out to collect a tax from every hapless individual who received wages from us. We became our “brother’s keeper.”

From time immemorial the tax collector has been feared and hated. The baron of old used to farm out his tax collections, paying his agent a percentage of what he was able to wrest from his impoverished subjects. It is not accidental that this job was placed upon the employer. A crafty Administration which thrived upon class hatred “planned it that way.” Here was another wedge to drive between the employer and the employee, another opportunity to cause misunderstanding and dissension. The employee did not blame his government, he blamed his employer, and even today thousands of workers in this country still think it is a dirty trick of the wicked capitalists.

But we weren’t as clever as the barons’ tax collectors. We didn’t pay ourselves for collecting taxes, we didn’t even reimburse ourselves for our expense in collecting taxes, we made ourselves responsible for other people’s taxes and we penalized ourselves for not collecting them. Let us read the law: “Every person required to deduct and withhold the tax… from the wages of an employee is liable for the payment of such tax whether or not it is collected from the employee. If, for example, the employer deducts less than the correct amount of tax or if he fails to deduct any part of the tax, he is nevertheless liable for the correct amount of the tax. However, if the employer… fails to deduct and withhold the tax and thereafter the income tax… is paid, the tax shall not be collected from the employer.” In other words, the Government won’t collect it twice — isn’t that big-hearted? But there is more. “Such payment does not, however,… relieve the employer from liability for penalties or for failure to deduct and withhold within the time prescribed by law.” So, if your employee does not pay his tax, you have to pay it, and if he does pay it but you do not deduct and withhold it, you can be fined and sent to prison. This in free America!

The most un-American phrase in our modern vocabulary is “take home pay.” What do we mean, “take home pay”? When I hire a man to work for me we discuss three things: the job to be done, the hours he shall work, and the wages he shall receive. And on Friday when he received that pay envelope, we have both fulfilled our contract for that week. There is no further obligation on either side. The money in that envelope belongs to him. He has worked for it and he has earned it. No one, not even the United States Government, has the right to touch it. Who dares to lay profane hands upon that money, to rudely filch from that free man the fruits of his labor, even before the money is in his own hands. This is a monstrous invasion of the rights of a free people and an outrageous perversion of the spirit of the Constitution. This is the miserable system foisted upon the people of our country by New Deal zealots and arrogant Communists who have wormed themselves into high places in Washington. This system is deliberately designed to make involuntary tax collectors of every employer and to impose involuntary tax servitude upon every employee. We don’t need to go to Russia for slavery, we’ve got it right here.

The employer or professional man, not on a salary, is allowed a bit of time in which to prepare his accounting and pay his tax. But from the salaried worker or wage earner that pay envelope is rudely snatched from the paymaster’s hand and those taxes taken in advance out of today’s butter or tomorrow’s hospital bill. This withholding law has made a greedy, avaricious monster out of the Federal Tax Grabber and an unwilling Simon Legree out of the wretched employer forced to do his dirty work for him.

Many otherwise patriotic citizens have lent themselves to this system because they mistakenly believed that it would create greater tax consciousness and a sentiment for economy in our Federal expenditures. Even if this were true, the system is still wrong. Shall we compromise our fundamental American principles for expediency? The majority of workers today figure their wages by the money in that pay envelope. And so they should. That 20 per cent is disregarded completely — it has been shifted to the shoulders of the employers and is nothing more or less than a 20 per cent payroll tax which is added to the price of every manufactured article. Labor doesn’t need a raise. All labor needs is to get what labor earns. Lop off that 20 per cent payroll tax, labor will have its raise, and the inflationary spiral will take a sharp dip down. It’s as simple as that.

And how about the millions of dollars spent by employers each year in collecting that tax? If it costs my little company as much as it does to deduct, withhold and pay that tax, what must it cost a big company such as General Motors? Why should we bear this additional expense? The Government gets the tax, doesn’t it? Well then, how about the Government paying for collecting it? I have searched the Constitution through and can find no power or right granted to the Federal Government for this mass picking of the pockets of the American people.

The very men who shout the loudest against the demands of the Union for the checkoff have connived and conspired with the New Dealers for this vast Government Checkoff.

Just how far are we going? Are we going to deduct contributions for the church, dues for the lodge, money for the grocery bill, the electric light and coal bill? Shall we buy clothes for the children and pay tuition for their schooling? Once having started, where do we stop? If this is Russia, then let’s say so. Let’s just hand the worker an envelope full of coupons at the end of each week and call it a day!

Paying taxes is a duty, a responsibility and a privilege of citizenship. Without taxes we can have no government. However I do not exercise other duties, responsibilities and privileges of citizenship for my employees. I do not vote for them, I do not form political opinions for them, I do not select a church for them, I do not pay real estate taxes for them. They are all free American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.

It is about four o’clock in Westport. By this time our payroll has been distributed. The income tax of each individual has been distributed. The income tax of each individual has been deducted and withheld, but it is the last time the Kellems Company will perform this service for the Government. I have more confidence in my employees than has their Government. I believe that every person in my employ will pay his taxes as long as we have an income tax law, but if he does not, that is a matter between himself and his Government, exactly as his religion is a matter between himself and his God. I have no right to inject myself into either relationship.

If High Tax Harry wants me to get that money for him, then he must appoint me an agent for the Internal Revenue Department, he must pay me a salary for my work, and he must reimburse me for my expenses incurred in collecting that tax. And I want a badge, too. I am not a tax collector and if an American citizen can be fined and thrown into prison for not collecting taxes from his workers, then let’s know about it now. Let’s see what the court has to say about this law — it’s not the first one passed in violation of the Constitution.

The decision to take this step has not been made hastily nor has it been an easy one. There are many sincere people who will censure me for breaking the law. Knowing this and having been through one New Deal smear and persecution, I still break this law, deliberately. Before I reach Westport the income tax inspector will be ensconced in my office, completely surrounded by my private papers, my company books and my canceled checks. He will greet me at the door, righteous indignation all over his face. Well, having gone through it before, I can go through it again. Because you see I made a discovery. Like all bullies and bloodsucking parasites, those mangy little bureaucrats down in Washington are at heart yellow cowards. So no matter what they do I’m standing on my rights until the court hands down its verdict.

As in the life of each individual there occasionally comes a moment of grave decision, so in the life of a free nation comes a significant moment, fraught with fearful consequences. We have reached such a moment in our development. Free people preserve their freedom and rid themselves of tyranny only be resistance and by breaking the law. We have a country because our forefathers defied a tyrant and broke the law. They broke tax laws. Rather than pay a tax they threw the tea into the harbor. They refused to pay a stamp tax. They poured their whisky down the drain rather than pay a tax on it. An American is aroused indeed, when he will sacrifice his liquor! Every man who signed the Declaration of Independence was a lawbreaker and a rebel. He broke the law, but he founded a nation. Thousands of patriotic American men and women spirited Negro slaves across the Canadian border. They broke the law but they freed a race. Thoreau, one of our most revered and honored philosophers, refused to pay a tax and went to prison. He broke the law but he saved his honor, and while in prison, he wrote that immortal document “Civil Disobedience.” It was the reading of “Civil Disobedience” which determined the whole course of Gandhi’s life. Brave American women suffered humiliation and imprisonment when they dared to defy the Government. They broke the law but they won the vote and freedom for their sex.

One night in the spring of 1947, a group of courageous women, about one hundred of them, gathered in my shop in Westport and at ten o’clock went to work. We were free American citizens prohibited by law from working after ten o’clock at night and before six in the morning. We broke the law but we gave back to the women of Connecticut their constitutional right to work when they please.

Did you ever break the prohibition law? Ever make any bathtub gin? Ever get a ticket for speeding? What is the difference between breaking the speed law and breaking the income tax law? A lot. For one you get slapped on the wrist with a small fine; for the other you get slapped in the jug with a big fine. The penalties should be reversed. Speeding may mean loss of life but cheating on the income tax means only loss of money. However, the New Deal has always valued American money more than American lives although it has spent both with impunity.

Unjust and tyrannical laws always breed contempt and evasion. Just as millions of Americans made, and sold, and drank liquor under Prohibition, so today millions of Americans are lying, and cheating, and evading the income tax. It is no more possible to enforce the income tax law than it was to enforce the prohibition law. We couldn’t plug those liquor leaks and we can’t plug these tax leaks. We are losing billions of dollars in unpaid taxes and the basis of business is rapidly shifting from credit to cash. Everything from apartment houses to fur coats is being sold for cash. We have become a nation of tax collectors, tax evaders and craven cowards. So, he who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.

Our forefathers bequeathed to us a heritage of freedom. Implicit in that bequest was the obligation and the responsibility to pass that freedom on to our posterity, unimpaired. What greater indictment can be made of our generation than that we have permitted that freedom to slip between our fingers; we have allowed despots and tyrants to tax it away from us. We cannot pass it on, in the American tradition, to our children who have every right to receive that freedom, so carefully guarded for us by our ancestors. We have failed in that sacred trust.

The whole country is confused and discouraged, no longer is there incentive and ambition to work, to achieve success, and to set aside savings for the future. Bombarded by ceaseless propaganda, robbed of his just earnings, the average American is like the worm ready to turn. All over this land there is one burning topic of conversation — taxes. A ground swell of seething resentment is growing into a tidal wave that may well engulf the tax planners, the tax grabbers and all their kind. Americans will bear a lot and are slow to anger but as this treasonable plot to sell us out unfolds before their eyes, they realize that this is not the ordinary corruption, mismanagement and bad government we have known in other periods of our history. This is something far more sinister. The destruction of the capitalistic system by increasingly heavy income taxes is the purest Marxian doctrine, and Lenin followed his great teacher, when in 1924, he declared that the United States would spend itself into destruction. We are becoming aware that these ruinous taxes are not accidental, they are not even a result of the war; they have been deliberately saddled upon our backs as a part of a plot of the Communists to take us over. Bankruptcy and national suicide stare us in the face.

How much longer are we going to take it? Is there no more good, old-fashioned American courage, or have we become a nation of spineless jellyfish? Are we worthy of the sacrifices of our forefathers or are we the silly suckers the rest of the world thinks us? There is no time to lose. We must strike now. We are the Government. We, the people, are still the strongest thing in our country and we can still get what we want. We just have to want it hard enough. We have fought and won a global war to free the whole world and have succeeded only in bringing chaos and misery to that world and in making tax slaves of ourselves.

So let’s repeal the income tax. You think it can’t be done? If we left it to you men, it couldn’t. But I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. We women are going to repeal it. We got you out of that prohibition mess, didn’t we? Well, we’ll dig you out of this one. But I want to remind you that we didn’t vote for either one — they were both exclusively your ideas. So we’ll get you out once more but for goodness’ sake, the next time you get such a brain wave, will you please tell us so we can stop you in time!

You see we women have more to lose in this situation than you men, we own most of the assets of the country. Approximately 70 or 80 per cent of the wealth of the United States is in our little, lily-white hands, and if you dear, sweet men don’t start taking care of yourselves, we’ll soon own it all. You work yourselves to the bone and along about forty or fifty, you pop off with heart disease. And not content with that, ever so often you have a war and stand up and shoot each other. Just keep this up and it won’t be long until we own and run the whole country. And I’ll give you three guesses as to how many income taxes we’ll have.

Because we women are just about fed up with all this nonsense, so-called socialized medicine, federal aid to education and all the rest of his paternalistic claptrap, designed to make us incompetent dependents upon the Government. All we want is for the Government to give back to the American people the money which is rightfully theirs, the money for which they work and which they earn, and we’ll pay our own doctors’ bills, we’ll educate our own children, and we’ll once more become self-respecting, self-reliant citizens. And, incidentally, we’ll stop spending half our time filling out ten thousand silly income tax returns, questionnaires and forms which will give us more time in which to make more money — for ourselves. Of course, this will automatically get rid of thousands of form makers, form readers, form filers and tax collectors but we’re not going to shed any tears about them. They can go out into private life and get productive jobs like the rest of us. With them off our backs we’ll save thousands of dollars and give ourselves another tax reduction.

We women are simple people. We can’t understand why the Government shouldn’t first determine its income and then live within it. Why does it pass the budget first and then run out and see where it’s going to get the money? Right now the Senate won’t act on the tax bill until it sees what the budget is going to be. We believe that instead of passing Mr. Truman’s supercolossal budget the Senate should first give us a whopping, big tax cut, right across the board, and then tell Mr. Truman how much money he can spend. That’s what we do. We first find out how much money we’re going to have and then we decide what we’ll spend and if that income doesn’t mean fur coats and diamond rings, well then we just don’t have fur coats and diamond rings. And we think it’s time the Federal Government cut out fur coats and diamond rings for a spell, and concentrated upon meat and potatoes.

And so may I be very impolite and close this little talk with a few words, not to you, but to another audience, a vast, unseen audience, many not within sound of my voice. I’m speaking to women, millions of American women; to every woman whose husband comes home at the end of the week with 20 per cent of his wages taken out of his pay envelope, to every woman worried and harassed over the mounting grocery bill, to every mother wondering how to buy a little boy a new pair of shoes, to every mother frantic with fear over a sick child, unable to pay a competent doctor. Women, women of America, let us band together! Let us rise up and say we will take no more of it. Let us write, let us wire, let us telephone our Congressmen, let us march on Washington, if necessary, but let us demand that this monstrous, wholesale robbery of the American people come to an end!

Determining copyright expiration is a strange art, and the convoluted law that governs it is every bit as baroque as modern Constitutionalist tax protester legal theory. So, I may be jumping the gun here. If you, dear reader, hold the rights to Vivien Kellems’s writings, please do let me know, so I can ask for permission to include it in my reader, and forgiveness for including it here.

A new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter, More Than a Paycheck, is out.

Among the interesting articles is one by NWTRCC coordinator Ruth Benn in which she recounts a meeting she recently had with an officer from the IRS’s “Abusive Tax Avoidance Transactions” branch.

From the sound of things, the IRS seems to be interpreting the war tax resistance advocacy of NWTRCC as though it were “promoting tax schemes” — putting that group in the same category as the kind of folks who peddle offshore tax shelters and bizarre Constitutionalist “sovereign citizen” untaxing kits.

In the course of explaining why ATAT was involved in my case, Officer E⸺ said “You are a threat to the compliance of the income tax system. If everyone did what you do, then the government could not do what they need to do.” Right. So we will continue to do what we feel we must do and see how things develop with the IRS.

Lincoln Rice reports on how the IRS cracked down on one such Constitutionalist group — We The People—

The court’s injunction was based on the conclusion that WTP had created an illegal tax shelter and tax fraud scheme. The injunction prohibits WTP from selling and/or distributing what the IRS considers false and fraudulent information, requires them to remove all this material from their website, requires them to post the injunction on their website, givemeliberty.org, and demands that they give to the government the list of names, addresses, emails, Social Security numbers, etc. of all the individuals and entities to whom they provided materials. The latter directive is perhaps the most disturbing from a constitutional point of view. The appeals court had temporarily blocked enforcement of that paragraph, but eventually sustained it, reasoning that forcing WTP to provide the names of its “customers” would allow the IRS to monitor whether those individuals were, in turn, failing to comply with the tax laws.

So if the IRS is now starting to treat NWTRCC as if it were an organization like We The People hawking fraudulent tax evasion schemes, could the IRS seek a similar injunction against NWTRCC?

Rice says, “probably not.”

The opinion is very precise on why WTP received this injunction, which indicates many substantial and significant differences between WTP and NWTRCC. First, WTP states that the federal government does not have the authority to tax U.S. citizens. As such, they offer materials that show interested parties how to “legally” stop W-4 withholding and provide individuals with paperwork to give their employer, which states that the employer can legally stop issuing W-2 and 1099 forms. This, in addition to their 16^th Amendment arguments, is viewed as fraudulent and misleading by the court. Second, the government’s interest in the case pertains to the loss of income caused by what they see as fraud. The government states that WTP is responsible for at least 997 individuals not filing tax returns for at least the past three years. And because it costs the IRS $1,607 to produce a substitute return, this has cost the government at least $4.8 million the last three years alone.

Third, WTP sold their “package” like a commercial product, charging admission to training sessions, and even offering customized “legal opinions” justifying these tax violations. While NWTRCC is of course trying to hurt the military budget’s bottom line, we are not distributing false information and are not operating on a commercial basis. NWTRCC always presents accurate information about legal and illegal ways of resisting taxes that pay for war, and candidly describes those which would constitute a form of civil disobedience. All of our materials represent, to best of our knowledge, the laws that some are choosing to break when they withhold taxes, while fully disclosing the penalties, fines, etc., that we may face.

Here’s a historical nugget that’s escaped my attention until now. A fellow named Joseph Bracken Lee, who was, at the time, governor of the state of Utah, in 1956 decided to stop paying his income tax because, in his words, “It is unconstitutional for this nation to tax its citizens for the support of foreign nations!”

Lee was part of the isolationist right wing — opposing foreign aid, the United Nations, and the income tax. The Republican party wasn’t nearly far enough to the right for him. He was a foe of Eisenhower, and ran against Richard Nixon as a third-party challenger in the presidential election of 1960. His invocation of the Constitution marks him as a likely forefather of today’s constitutionalist tax protesters. The form of his protest, though, bore much more resemblance to that of conscientious tax resisters than do those of most of today’s constitutionalists.

“I am refusing,” Lee wrote to the IRS, “to pay that portion of my tax which was not withheld in order to instigate a court test of the constitutional right of the U.S. government to appropriate taxpayers’ funds for foreign aid.” He eventually forced the issue in his political capacity, filing a Supreme Court suit on behalf of the state of Utah, making this same argument. “I am not attempting to avoid payment of taxes, but am simply using this means to bring a constitutional question before a federal court. I trust you will proceed with the necessary legal action against me to collect my unremitted tax and thus bring this matter before a federal court.”

His political opponents accused him of grandstanding and using the issue for publicity. The IRS seized the money — which he had deposited in a bank specifically to cover such a possibility — from his account a few months later.

Later, after his terms as governor, and not making much progress in politics (he had been ousted as governor by a primary challenger in his own Republican party), he became the national chairman of “For America,” which agitated for the repeal of the federal income tax. He spoke at John Birch Society meetings, but also palled around with libertarians and even wrote the forward to minarchist Frank Chodorov’s The Income Tax: Root of All Evil.

With April 15^th coming up, tax-related stories are making my RSS feeds look like the Nile in flood season. Here are some that have caught my eye:

• Emma Ross-Thomas at Bloomburg News reports that “Tax dodgers multiply as underground economy cushions job cuts.” According to the article, in times of economic distress, the proportion of the economy that goes underground expands: businesses go off the books, workers take informal economy jobs, and so forth. The article focuses on the idea that this makes the economy look worse than it is, as the official statistics are only counting the above-ground economy. But I prefer to look at it as people getting good practice in untaxed economic activity.
• Sitara Nieves gives a history of tax evasion, tax resistance, and tax rebellion at The Takeaway.
• Trevor Bothwell at The Libertarian Examiner explains what he finds dissatisfactory about the constitutionalist “show me the law” tax protester set.
• Geov Parrish updates his annual Why Pay Taxes? column for Eat The State but this time there’s something different — a counterpoint argument: “Why I Love Paying Taxes.”
• One silver lining to the recent economic cloud is that with people earning less income, there’s less to tax, and governments are bringing in less money. Here’s a news piece that quantifies some of this:

  In the report, CBO projects that the Social Security trust funds will collect just $3 billion more in cash receipts than they will pay out in benefits in the 2010 budget year that starts in October. A year ago, before the economy slipped into recession, the CBO projected an $86 billion cash surplus for the same year.

Yesterday was the first full day of the NWTRCC National Gathering in Cleveland, Ohio.

NWTRCC regulars were joined by curious locals like Tom Quinn of EcoWatch and Michael Patterson from Dennis Kucinich’s office (our meeting place is in Kucinich’s House district and he was curious enough to send an aide to take notes).

A few things jumped out at me during the opening introductory go-’round:

• Jim Stockwell of North Carolina mentioned that after some initial mutual suspicion there was surprising synergy between the traditional Tax Day protest his war tax resistance group held last April 15^th and the Tea Party protests going on at the same time.
• Many of the local groups reported diminishing numbers and less-frequent activity in the past months, mirroring a general doldrums in the peace movement.
• Bill Ramsey noted that it has become harder to set up alternative funds in the post-9/11 financial paperwork era.
• Ramsey also reported on an interesting and creative tax day protest in his neck of the woods. A group grabbed hundreds of 1040 forms from public places where such things are found (libraries, post offices, and the like), then printed ghostly images of coffins and of children wounded in war over the forms, and then replaced them where they had originally found them.
• Ginny Sсhnеider noted that in New Hampshire, the notoriety of the Ed and Elaine Brown tax protester stand-off fiasco has made it difficult for her to do outreach in the progressive community. People hear “tax resistance” and immediately their minds conjure up images of nuts holing up with their arsenals and their conspiracy theories until the government locks them up for life.

We watched a near-final cut of a film NWTRCC is producing about war tax resistance and resisters: Death and Taxes. It met with great acclaim (and plenty of suggestions for last-minute edits). Last I heard, it’s due for release next month some time.

Attendees watch a cut of Death and Taxes, an introductory war tax resistance film due to be released next month

Later, Phil Althouse, an election observer in El Salvador, updated us on conditions there, and Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace talked about how to move from activism to organizing and build bonds between disparate parts of the broader anti-war coalition.

Mike Ferner and Phil Althouse address the gathering

While coalition building always sounds great in the abstract, when it comes down to actually doing it, it runs into the practical difficulty of finding a common ground and deciding where to compromise and where no compromise is possible. Ferner thought that organizing around the larger vision of real democracy was the way to go. Other folks were skeptical. It can be difficult to find anything approaching an ideological common ground even in a small group like NWTRCC with an inherently common, specialized and political interest.

In members of NWTRCC there’s often a tension between avowed nonviolent principles and promotion of progressive projects (like universal health care and publicly-financed elections for instance) that fundamentally rely on a coercive, violent state to carry them out. The avowedly nonviolent progressives either don’t see the violent ramifications inherent in such projects or I have failed to understand the ingenious way they have squared this circle. I usually avoid the temptation to press the point, but sometimes give in.

Anyway, after this we split up into two groups: a War Tax Resistance 101 discussion group that I moderated, and a larger group that discussed issues of interest to more experienced resisters. There were other groups that met over the course of the afternoon as well, but by then I found it hard to be in even one place at once.

In the evening we heard more in-depth stories of the tax resistance from our hosts, Maria Smith and Charlie Hurst, and from Juanita Nelson and Erica Weiland. Juanita Nelson told the story of her arrest-in-a-Sears-bathrobe that she also tells in A Matter of Freedom. Erica described her transformation from a young Dean Democrat to a tax resisting anarchist (a salvation narrative in which, to my delight, The Picket Line plays a role).

Juanita Nelson tells her story

Here’s another story about Utah Governor J. Bracken Lee’s tax resistance, from the 17 April 1956 Eugene Register-Guard:

Utah Governor Intent on Testing Tax Law

Salt Lake City (AP) — The deadline for paying federal income tax passed Monday midnight, but part of Utah Gov. J. Bracken Lee’s tax money rested Tuesday in a safe deposit box in a Salt Lake City bank.

“And that’s where it will stay,” Lee says, “until a court rules that either I or the government have a right to it.”

The Republican governor contends it is unconstitutional for the federal government to use tax revenue to aid foreign nations. By refusing to pay his tax he hopes to force a court test of this contention.

“There is no provision anywhere in the Constitution granting the U.S. government the right to appropriate taxpayers’ money for support of foreign nations,” Lee said, adding he’ll “fight… in the Supreme Court, if necessary, to prove my case.”

Last week Secretary of the Treasury Humphrey wrote Lee the government would “proceed in the usual manner to collect the taxes” if the governor didn’t pay up before the deadline.

Lee said Monday he believes the “usual manner” might take some time — probably until after the November elections.”

“But I’m not going to wait for the government to come to me,” he said. “I have my attorneys preparing briefs and I expect to take the case into court in about 50 days. At that time I will ask the government for a declaratory judgment.”

Lee filed his income tax return last January but did not enclose the money he owes on earnings other than his salary of $10,000, which is subject to the federal withholding tax. He declined to say how much the “other earnings,” mostly from investments, amount to.

Here’s another take on the story from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and some editorial comment from the Toledo Blade. In August, Lee asked the Supreme Court to step in:

“Congress under the constitution has no power to collect and expend taxes for such purposes," Lee said in a brief which he filed with the court as governor of Utah and “in behalf of said state.”

Enforcement of federal tax laws in his state, he argued, “is causing not merely a violation of the federal rights of Utah citizens” but also “a definited pecuniary loss and financial damage to the state itself.”

In his brief, Lee asked permission to file with the court an original complaint — an action which could bypass the customary course of litigation through various lower courts.

Lee said a 1923 supreme court decision foreclosed the possibility of an individual questioning congressional expenditures.

“The right of a state, however, to raise such question must exist,” he contended.

The Supreme Court didn’t buy it, refusing to hear his case.

I don’t much cover the constitutionalist “show me the law” style tax protesters here because most of them seem to be motivated not by conscientious objection nor even by a desire to wield grassroots political force against an unjust political order, but by something that strikes me more as a sort of cognitive pathology.

But I try to keep an open mind, and I look out for occasions when the tactics or arguments of this variety of tax protester have something to teach the rest of us.

And, in truth, there is a big grey area. The British women’s suffragist tax resisters were very much motivated by what they saw as a legitimate constitutional challenge but that the prevailing political order saw as quasi-legal balderdash. But the constitutional angle was an important rhetorical tool in justifying their resistance to others and in recruiting less-militant feminists.

Here’s an example of an early constitutionalist tax protester in the U.S. — Arthur J. Porth. Although his techniques and legal arguments put him very much in the constitutionalist “show me the law” tradition, when he was asked to explain his motivations, he put things in conscientious objection terms:

There was nothing that my parents taught me to disobey any tax laws. However, I can truthfully say that the King James Bible and my Christian teaching have influenced me that it would be wrong to pay money to anybody that would use that money to destroy the nation. It is not in God’s plan that His people use money for that kind of a purpose.

A New York Times article on this date ten years ago, though mostly about the “show me the law” tax protester movement, included this interesting item:

Some years ago, the IRS did pursue organizations that publicly declared they would not withhold taxes. One prominent case was a church with a national following, the Indianapolis Baptist Temple.

Unlike churches that accept tax-deductible donations, the church contended that it answered only to God and not to any government, and therefore it was not required to withhold taxes from its employees’ paychecks. The IRS demanded payment, and federal judges ruled that the church owed $3.6 million in taxes for 1987 through 1993, plus interest. Federal marshals seized the parsonage on Nov. 14 and are authorized to seize the church itself, which members are now occupying in protest.

The rest of the article concerns businesses that had stopped withholding taxes for their employees, under the theory that their employees didn’t owe these taxes. The implication of the article was that these employers were getting away with it because the IRS was neglecting to go after them. (The protesters own theory was that the IRS was not going after them because they were in the right and the agency had no authority to do so.)

But here is what has since happened to the tax protesters mentioned in the article:

Al Thompson

Convicted in 2005 of 13 tax law violations and sentenced to 72 months in prison.

Joe R. Banister

Acquitted in 2005 of a count of conspiracy in connection with his work with Thompson, lost his CPA license and was disbarred from representing clients in cases with the IRS.

Irwin Schiff

“He has lost several civil cases against the federal government and has a record of multiple convictions for various federal tax crimes. Schiff is serving a 13-plus year sentence for tax crimes…”

Dick Simkanin

Convicted in 2004 of 29 tax law violations and sentenced to seven years behind bars, then reimprisoned this year for violating the terms of his release (he remains in prison today).

From the 23 February 1980 Spokane Daily Chronicle:

Author Waging War on Taxes

by Cynthia Kyle

Unadilla, Mich. (AP) — Lynn Johnston is certain the Internal Revenue Service has shadowed her, read her mail, picked over her garbage and scared off would-be beaus.

At 33, her hair is slowly turning gray, but nothing is slowing her self-proclaimed campaign to put the IRS out of business.

Miss Johnston — author of “Who’s Afraid of the IRS?” — remains a “taxpayer on strike.” She always pays property taxes late and hasn’t paid income taxes in years.

She is orchestrating seven legal battles against taxes. Six of them are in federal courts, and one is headed for the Michigan Supreme Court.

Her first court fight — in 1975 in Grand Rapids — was over $16.34 in federal taxes she refused to pay.

“I went to trial, picked my own jurors, did my own research and won. It was easy,” says the vivacious self-employed lecturer, writer and researcher. In the past, she has modeled, sold antiques, peddled advertising and worked for Michigan Bell Telephone Co.

Her latest fight — which so far has reached the state Court of Appeals, where she lost — is over the federal excise tax on her telephone bill. Miss Johnston went without a telephone for 22 months at one stretch.

“I missed two funerals. I missed lectures. I missed dates. I was stood up five times and I’m a single woman — aging,” she says with a grin.

In every case, she’s her own lawyer, arguing complicated court rules and tax laws despite no formal legal training.

“If you know what your rights are you don’t have any trouble,” she says. “If you don’t, you get confused — real fast.”

The woman’s personal war against taxes started as part of a Vietnam War protest when she was 18, headed for a teaching degree at Western Michigan University.

She refused to pay excise taxes on telephone calls then “because I didn’t want my money spent for the war.” When the fighting was over, her low-risk tax protest wasn’t. By then she had decided that taxes on telephone conversations are like “taxing the First Amendment.”

“I came to realize the excise tax was wholly inappropriate. You’re held back from talking that much more if you’re on a limited budget — like I am most of the time.”

She hasn’t paid income taxes “because I don’t owe any,” refuses to pay into Social Security, but eventually comes up with property taxes because they go toward basic services.

She’s never been convicted of tax evasion, and has only once been questioned at home by IRS agents. “All you have to do is tell them to get off your property and they boogie,” she says.

She lives with “Pinky,” a pedigreed angora rabbit in a weatherbeaten 1837 house that leans, has no closets and is cluttered with Victorian-era finishings.

Her income — how much she won’t tell — comes from writing, research and contributions.

While saying she would rather spend her time pursuing quieter research about such things as human health, Miss Johnston insists her anti-tax days aren’t over.

“The Internal Revenue Service has always seemed confiscatory to me. Freedom is my highest value,” Miss Johnston says. “You’re either free or you’re not free.

“I’m not going to give up as long as I think freedom isn’t being properly protected,” she says. “I am going to live all my life as a free person. Hard choices in life develop character.

“They have called me the sweetheart of the tax resistance movement. The sweetheart is getting gray. I may be getting older, but I’m no less determined to put the IRS out of business.”

This grizzled 33-year-old went on to run for Senate on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1984. In 1982 she tried to get an initiative on the Michigan ballot to abolish all state and local taxes!

She developed something called the “Public Servant Questionnaire” with which citizens could turn the tables and request useful and important data about the government agents who had come to ask for useful and important data about them.

Here’s an article about the 1975 tax case that she won (in 1977). Amazingly, she convinced a jury that she did not have to pay a city income tax because the 16^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had not been properly ratified by Ohio! You don’t see that old chestnut succeeding often.

This is another interesting case of a sort of hybrid “show me the law” tax protester and a conscientious tax resister.

As a reminder of why the IRS finds these “show me the law” style tax protesters so threatening, here’s an article from the Ocala Star-Banner thirty years ago today:

Flint-Area Workers Stage Income-Tax Protest

Detroit (AP) — Some 3,500 Flint-area workers, in what the Internal Revenue Service calls “one of the biggest tax protest movements in the country,” are directing employers not to make income tax deductions from their paycheck.

Most of the workers are employees of General Motors Corp., where word of the protest has spread by word-of-mouth and through organizations promoting the revolt, the Detroit News reported Sunday.

The workers have been trying to sidestep deductions by claiming as many as 99 dependents on their W-4 forms. Others filed federal W-4E forms, designed for low-income workers who do not plan to earn enough to pay income taxes, he said.

One protest leader contends labor is a personal property traded to an employer for wages and is thus ineligible for taxation.

IRS officials initially became aware of the move when employers, as required by law, began informing the IRS of large numbers of employees changing their filing status last fall.

“This is the biggest, or at least one of the biggest, tax protest movements in the country,” said Leonard Nawrocki, IRS manager of criminal investigations in Flint.

Nawrocki said many of the workers, feeling there is “safety in numbers,” do not expect to be prosecuted for false returns.

“We’re trying to alert people and convince them that wages are taxable and they could be subject to penalties, interest and criminal sanctions if they continue to refuse to pay,” Nawrocki said.

Dean Hazel of Pontiac, a GM employee who founded the tax protest group “We The People ACT,” said an estimated 700 members pay $65 in monthly dues for such benefits as tax law workshops and cassette tapes explaining the rationale for avoiding taxes.

“If Nawrocki wants to haul our guys into court, he’ll get his ears pinned back,” said Hazel. “The IRS has been losing on ‘false and fraudulent’ W-4 cases for years. So many people are doing it they’ll never be able to keep up.”

Nawrocki said the IRS had increased its audits of tax returns and had begun forwarding names of violators to its collection unit to obtain compensation for tax liabilities.

However, only five cases had been referred for possible prosecution.

Hazel got showed the law good and hard a few months later, then lost his appeal. Last I checked, he’s still agitating in right-wing circles for the One True Constitution.

On this date in 1980, UPI carried a long article by Steven W. Syre about tax resisters and constitutionalist tax protesters in the United States.

Most of the article concerns the “show me the law”-style tax protesters — folks like Charles Rielly, Paul A. Hein Jr., Irwin Schiff, Gordon S. Buttorff, Charles A. Dodge, and Alton Moss — and their various arguments and techniques. But there is also some mention of war tax resisters:

On March 14, Brandeis University professor Paul Monsky was convicted on tax evasion charges in U.S. District Court in Boston. The 43-year-old math teacher did not pay taxes for six years to protest military spending. It took a jury less than two hours to decide Monsky was guilty of defrauding the government by claiming 42 exemptions, even though he attached explanations on his tax forms.

He faces a possible $500 fine and a one-year prison term when sentenced.

Bruce Chrisman, a Mennonite pacifist from Ava, Ill., made the same claim on his 1975 return and received a similar verdict last Dec. 3.

Chrisman, an organic truck farmer who grows alfalfa sprouts, maintained his conscience as a Christian pacifist prohibits him from supporting killing, even indirectly through taxes to finance the military.

The now-defunct libertarian magazine Inquiry carried an article about American tax resistance, “Constitutionalist” tax protest, and tax evasion in its 2 April 1979 edition:

War resisters, libertarians, and rock stars have joined millions of other Americans in fighting the tax man.

Tax Revolt!

by Frank Browning

Once a week, a small but growing group of men and women in Billings, Montana, meet in each other’s houses. They are not there to hold Tupperware parties, organize church bingo games, or play bridge. Instead, they are discussing strategies for the organization of a revolt against the government of the United States.

These ranchers and storekeepers are not unkempt anarchists or the central committee of some international terrorist underground. On the contrary, they are the descendants of a grand American tradition: They are tax rebels who believe that government taxation has become little more than blatant confiscation of citizens’ property to feed the insatiable appetites of Washington politicians and bureaucrats.

Martin Beckman is a leader of the Montana tax resistance movement. His Billings-based group — Americans for Constitutional Government — counsels taxpayers who are fed up with handing over one-fifth of their earnings to the federal government each year. The IRS form 1040, Beckman has proclaimed, is an illegal “confession sheet” that the feds use to defraud ordinary, hardworking citizens. “No American has to sign a confession sheet,” he maintains. “The government has used form 1040 to extort billions of dollars from American citizens.” In Big Timber, a small town not far from Billings, Beckman met with a newly formed group of tax rebels last spring. “The government is taking advantage of our lack of knowledge of our Constitution,” he told these new recruits to the movement, explaining further that IRS tax forms are a violation of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination. “You only have those rights you demand. You use those rights or you lose them. Our founding fathers were all tax rebels.”

Although the IRS and the federal courts have refused to consider the Fifth Amendment “self-incrimination” argument as justification for refusing to file tax returns, and although Beckman himself has been the butt of IRS investigations, his Montana group is thriving. Other independent tax protest groups are flourishing in other sections of Montana and in Connecticut, California, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia — in almost every section of the nation.

The ranks of these tax rebels are increasing so fast that the commissars of the Internal Revenue Service have begun to show signs of panic. For the 1975 tax year, the IRS had to order almost a million Americans to file income tax reports. And as the IRS deploys its agents and its computers in a new get-tough campaign, the tax resisters are themselves growing tougher. Like the people of Billings, they are organizing informal study groups, community meetings, taxpayers’ unions, instructional workshops, and fraternal associations, and are even lobbying in Washington.

Ten years ago, tax resisters were thought of as radicals or peaceniks who, like singer Joan Baez, were unpatriotically refusing to contribute to the Vietnam War efforts. Today the activist fringe has been swept aside by the anger of ordinary people who feel stymied by the rising cost of living and the falling value of the dollar. A Louis Harris survey conducted in March 1977 found that Americans are more fed up than ever with the federal tax system. Sixty-six percent of those polled declared their tax burden had reached “the breaking point,” 87 percent believed that “the big tax burden falls on the little man,” and 84 percent agreed that “the tax system is set up to let the rich get the real breaks.” Little wonder that the tax rebellion is growing larger and stronger.

Jim Davidson, executive director of the National Taxpayers Union, a libertarian tax reform group, estimates that some 10 million Americans have refused to pay federal income taxes — 10 times the number the IRS says it has caught. Several years ago, the editors of U.S. News & World Report, quoting tax experts, estimated that the government loses around $30 billion in unpaid taxes annually. New studies made at Bernard Baruch College in New York City suggest that an immense “underground economy” exists in the United States, an economy that functions totally on cash and in 1977 produced some $195 billion, 10 percent of the entire gross national product. None of that income was taxed. Whether they are outspoken tax resisters or the clever tax evaders of the “underground economy”; whether they have set up tax-deductible family corporations or have bought up secret number “honor bonds”; tax rebels are fueling the biggest national insurrection since the armed farmers of Massachusetts launched Shay’s Rebellion 192 years ago to protest the unfair tax system of the new American government.

The use of all these devices reflects what many economists see as a return to the anonymity of a cash economy by millions of middle-class Americans who are struggling to fight inflation by moonlighting at extra jobs where no taxes are collected. “Our theory,” said a representative of Chase Econometric Associates, a subsidiary of the Chase Manhattan Bank, “and I must emphasize that it is still a theory, is that Americans are returning to self-employment as a means of support and not reporting the income to the government.” If he is right, it means that Americans are following in the footsteps of the French, the English, and the Italians for whom tax cheating is more the norm than the exception. According to Business Week: “Signs are increasing that as tax rates soar, and as inflation pushes people into higher tax brackets while it erodes purchasing power, Americans are starting to copy citizens of other countries in their efforts to evade the tax collector.”

Mike Tecton is typical of the tax rebels. A lanky architect from Oklahoma, he has been a tax resister for 19 years — although he prefers to call himself a “Constitutionalist.” He and his wife Jane live in a plain, unpretentious house in McLean, Virginia, a 15-minute drive from IRS headquarters in downtown Washington. In 1974 he made his tax protest public by founding the Thomas Jefferson Equal Tax Society, an organization dedicated to eliminating the graduated federal income tax through court action, on the ground that it is discriminatory. The IRS immediately began to close in, and last year Tecton found himself behind bars.

“For over a decade Mike didn’t file or pay income tax,” his wife explained. “For 11 years there was no response from the IRS. Then Mike spoke in 1974 at a tax seminar in Chicago and flew to California to speak at another. That’s when the IRS came after him.” In the summer of 1974 Tacton placed a small advertisement for his newly founded Thomas Jefferson Society in the Washington Star. His ad read: “I, MIKE TECTON, FREE BORN CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES, CHALLENGE THE IRS AGENTS OR ANY OTHER MEMBER OF CONGRESS TO A TV DEBATE ON THE ISSUE ‘CAN EQUALLY FREE CITIZENS BE FORCED BY CONGRESS TO SUBMIT TO UNEQUAL TAX CLASSES, INFERIOR TAX CLASSES, TAX PAYING CLASSES, OR ANY OTHER TAX CLASSES?’ I SAY NO!”

Four days after he ran his newspaper ad, IRS agents tracked Tecton down in Chicago where he was working on an architectural project. On October 22, 1974, he was convicted of failing to file an IRS 1040 tax form, and was sentenced to three years’ probation and fined $300. In 1976 probation was revoked on charges that he failed to file tax returns in 1975, which he disputes, and he was sentenced to six months in prison. He began serving time on January, 3, 1978.

Mike and Jane Tecton believe that the IRS is more interested in gagging opponents of the system than in collecting back taxes. At one point, agents came to their McLean home and announced that the Tectons owed $22,000 in back taxes. “Prove it!” Mike shot back. The agents left. So far the IRS has not pressed its claim. Nor have the Tectons been silenced.

While Mike was in the Allenwood federal prison camp, Jane kept in touch with members of the Thomas Jefferson Society and with other tax resister groups across the country. She published the first edition of USA, the society’s monthly newspaper, which she claims had a press run of 10,000. In the last three years the society has published 17 books and pamphlets with such titles as 101 Reasons Why the Income Tax is Unconstitutional, and I Charge Congress with These Crimes.

The Thomas Jefferson Society operates on the principle that the government is committing a crime by withholding the taxes of working people from their paychecks. He calls it “enforced slavery” by organized theft of citizens’ property. Across the Potomac River from McLean, in Washington, D.C., is another group of tax resisters who have formed a nonprofit cooperative print shop and who refuse to send their taxes to the IRS. Ed Guinan is a priest and the coordinator of the shop, called Collective Impressions. A year and a half ago Guinan and his colleagues decided to continue paying social security taxes but to send their withholding taxes to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

“Every quarter, when taxes are due, we send a check to the Arms Control Agency,” Guinan says. “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.” Collective Impressions owes only $500 per quarter to the IRS, but Guinan and his coworkers believe they are making an effective protest against U.S. military spending policies.

Ed Guinan and Mike and Jane Tecton see their refusal to pay taxes as a tough-minded fight against the U.S. government — a government that they believe is not honestly or legally representing its citizens. Collective Impressions in effect pays its taxes — but not to the U.S. government. “It’s wrong to try to damage or defraud someone,” Jane Tecton argues. “An honest belief based on something is different. Our game isn’t money. Money, big cars, they don’t mean anything to us. We don’t bother with people who aren’t sincere.”

For every staunch, unyielding tax resister, of course, there are untold numbers of “tax avoiders.” A tax avoider is someone who opposes paying taxes to the federal government, and who has chosen a wily strategy rather than a simple declaration of resistance. The biggest tax avoiders are large corporations and their executives. For example:

• Pepsico Corporation and Owens-Illinois, Inc. take care of their top brass by leasing an exclusive salmon stream for them in Iceland.
• A New York executive claimed business lunch deductions for 338 days in one year — skipping Thanksgiving Day but deducting lunches for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. His meals usually ran above $20 each for an annual total deduction of almost $10,000.
• An executive at Time magazine took his five-course lunch at New York’s exclusive Chambord every day; for dinner he usually drank a milkshake or ate a boiled egg. The restaurant sent his bill directly to Time, which deducted it as a corporate expense.

Nick Panagi, a writer, sometime university lecturer, and occasional carpenter, is the consummate tax avoider. He is now in his late fifties, his close-cropped beard graying slightly at the fringe. He lives in a simple, modern oceanfront apartment on one of the elegantly funky beaches west of Los Angeles. Born in Rumania of Greek-Sicilian parents, he grew up in the Hell’s Kitchen district of New York City where he shed his accent in a record six months to avoid being beaten up at school. Since he came to southern California, he has been a legal consultant, a lecturer, and a professor at one of the city’s largest universities. “Nick Panagi” is of course a pseudonym.

“Do I operate on some set of great political principles?” he asked. “I have only one principle and it’s very simple: I don’t like the government. The taxes are usually used for things that help the rich and never help the poor.”

Panagi takes his argument about taxes a step further than the tax rebels at the Thomas Jefferson Society or the Taxpayers Union. “Their kind of ‘principled’ stand to refuse to pay taxes never achieves anything. It didn’t stop the Vietnam War; it won’t end pollution and it can’t correct the corrupt welfare system. Until there are massive, powerful organizations controlled by the working people in this country and dedicated to fighting the system, the only hope is to create more and more rebels.

“I never pay taxes,” Panagi proclaims with pride. This is the 17^th year in which he claims indeed not to have given a cent to the U.S. government. For many of those years he worked as a writer or a consultant and no taxes were deducted from his paychecks. But even in those salaried years when tax was withheld, the IRS refunded it all to him. The principle Panagi uses to avoid taxes grew out of his experiences as a young man when he commuted every week between Boston and New York.

“In those days, before there were fast freeways, I’d always speed like a hellion Monday mornings and Friday nights. Of course, I’d get stopped at least twice a month; the cop would walk up to the car with some line like, ‘Hey, buddy, what’s the hurry?’ I’d answer, nervous and embarrassed, ‘Oh, yeah, I guess I was going 85’ — when I knew I had only been driving 75 or 80. I always admitted going faster than I was actually driving, and immediately the cop would be off his guard, ask me if something was wrong and be ready to believe any story I told him. That’s the key to avoiding taxes in this system: The more you flaunt it, the more respectable you appear. The richer you are, the more you deserve. If you made $5000 last year and had legitimate expenses of $4500, the IRS won’t believe you. But if you earned $150,000 and post illegitimate expenses of $138,000, they will. So always make your income appear as high as possible.”

Last year, as in the last several years, Panagi has earned about $18,000. Following his method, he has never reported an income below $30,000. How? Any check he receives, he records as income. An out-of-town friend asks him to cash a $50 check for the weekend. A girlfriend lends him $500 or $1000 for “a trip to Las Vegas.” He pays her back immediately but records her check as income. Eight friends go out to dinner. He takes the tab and pays the check. The seventh collects cash from the other six and writes him a check, which he records as income. The restaurant tab he marks as research and entertainment for a story and deducts the whole amount as expenses. A friend signs over his paycheck and Panagi writes the friend a personal check for a few dollars more in return. The original payroll check deposited in Panagi’s account is reported as income. By the end of the year, he has accumulated at least $12,000 in “outside income.”

And then what?

“As a free-lancer or consultant, everywhere I go, practically everything I eat, most of my clothes, my auto expenses, the books and periodicals I buy — they’re all deductible expenses. And since I earned $12,000 outside my salary, that income is itself proof that I operate a personal consulting business — even if I don’t write a single article or deliver a single lecture. As a matter of fact I really do all those things each year — and I lose money operating that personal business.”

Panagi has other write-off tricks. Frequently he picks up the tab for eight or ten people in a fancy restaurant — and nobody pays him back. Since a wife is not deductible as a secretary, he is not married. “Two years ago I went to Puerto Rico and I took a woman with me. The ‘salary’ I gave her as my secretary and all her expenses there could be deducted. Every trip I make, I usually take a companion, and she’s always deductible.”

Panagi admits that he has been audited, and frequently. The IRS auditors always seem puzzled that he can spend as much or more than he earns. “I tell them I borrow money — and I do. I live on credit, credit cards, and bank loans. Some of my friends say, ‘But look how much interest you pay.’ That’s true too. Last year, 1977 for example, I paid almost $2000 in interest on credit cards and loans. But if I didn’t live as extravagantly as I do, I wouldn’t get back as big an income tax refund — almost $6000. So even with the high interest payments, I made a net profit last year of $4000.”

Panagi’s formula reduces to two maxims: Operate some kind of independent consulting business (even though you earn a regular salary) in order to file a self-employment tax return, and live as high as possible.

The Panagi formula, of course, requires certain privileges many people lack. Bank credit may take years to establish. Not everyone can get credit cards, and maintaining a family of five may also raise the stakes of the Panagi system dangerously close to disaster. A more modest device for the beleaguered family is the “family corporation.”

Family corporations are simply small, home-town versions of U.S. Steel, Chase Manhattan, and Pan American Airways — none of which paid any federal income tax in 1976. The only taxes family corporations owe are on profits and capital gains. The officers of the corporation may be members of the family and any others whom the incorporators wish to name. The key to the success of the family corporation is a careful assessment of the marketable skills each family member may have.

“Anyone who has expert knowledge in some field of endeavor can become a consultant in that field,” says Stephen Angell, an adviser to the War Resisters League. “Sales, manufacturing, and management are all legitimate objects of a business enterprise, and each of these categories should be given broad interpretation. For example, manufacturing includes handmade articles, and management encompasses property management. Most family corporations of course have business property, usually houses, which may be partially leased for residential purposes. A proportionate share of all house expenses — insurance, repairs, heat, light, telephone, taxes, depreciation, and mortgage interest, becomes a deductible business expense.” He also points out that many family members’ hobbies can be adapted to business purposes. Family members who like pets may be paid a fee by the corporation each month to raise stock, which, when it reaches maturity, is offered on the market. The expenses are deductible, and it may take several years to develop a profitable enterprise.

“If you enjoy gardening, then farming and selling produce could become a part of your business,” he notes. “You could also garden for yourself on the side. If you are a stamp collector, become a dealer in stamps. A skier can rent skis.” Group life insurance, health insurance, and IRS-approved retirement plans can also be removed from personal budgets and made deductible business expenses.

A growing number of married couples in which both partners work have found it valuable to fly off to some Caribbean island for a Christmas divorce; because they are single on December 31 they can file their taxes independently at a much lower rate than would have applied to their combined incomes. If they are so fortunate as to remarry after January 1, so much for the rewards of marital bliss. Many couples have found that their tax savings more than offset the cost of their holiday divorces.

Anxious to cash in on the burgeoning rushed to offer what has been called “the little guy’s legal way to cheat on taxes.” For years wealthy globe-trotters have beaten the tax racket by stashing their wealth in numbered bank accounts abroad where their money is safe from IRS scrutiny. The favorite tax havens for the superrich have been Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Panama, and some Caribbean islands. Since the late 1960s, however, a number of small U.S. banks have begun offering so-called “Honor Bonds” to their customers.

Originated in Columbus, Ohio, these honor bonds are low-denomination certificates of deposit issued without names, payable to “bearer” and identified by code numbers. They are transferable from one owner to the next without any notice to the issuing bank-and, unlike most savings accounts, no interest record is forwarded to the IRS.

“Why go to Switzerland?” asked one Camden, New Jersey, bank in its ads for the special bonds. “The bank will not issue an IRS 1099 form,” promised a Columbus, Ohio, bank, adding, “Since NO name appears on the bond and no customer identification number is required, the Honor Bond you buy is completely anonymous. They can be used as gifts or to pay debts.” Another bank was even blunter: “Numbered Savings are issued by Serial Number only TO PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! They’re perfect gifts because no transfer notice is necessary — no names, no notice…” By early this year honor bonds were available from banks in 14 states in denominations of $25 up to $5000. According to Representative Benjamin Rosenthal, a New York Democrat who held hearings into the use of the bonds in March 1978, “Hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘No-Name’ bonds have been issued. The potential tax loss to the Treasury as a result of the issuance of these negotiable instruments,” he warned, “relates not only to income taxes, but to estate and gift taxes as well.”

Rosenthal is not alone in his fear of what honor bonds may do for the little man. The IRS is working itself into a veritable lather. A year ago it proposed changing tax filing regulations on the bonds to require banks to report the names of the bonds’ owners as well as the amount of interest paid on them. As Acting Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Donald Lubick told a congressional subcommittee, “This non-compliance diminishes public respect for the operation of the tax system and could jeopardize our system of voluntary compliance.” It is hard to imagine how public respect for the IRS could be any lower than it is already, but given the tax collectors’ penchant for belligerence against the ordinary American taxpayer, Lubick may be right. Within its proposed change of the rules governing honor bond reporting, the IRS does plan of course to allow wealthy investors (those who buy over $100,000 in bonds) to continue the advantages they have always had. Although the IRS will probably eliminate the tax evasion opportunities on the smaller honor bonds, they will still guarantee anonymity to the original owners of the bonds. All of which makes one wonder whose interests the IRS has at heart.

The sallow-faced folk from the IRS are increasingly alert to the tactics of tax-avoiders. Harry Margolis is a San Francisco area tax lawyer, a man whose clients have included both political radicals and the fabulously wealthy; he was brought to trial in 1977 on a charge of conspiracy. Margolis, near retirement, was facing the possible prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. When he was indicted, the Justice Department called the case “the biggest breakthrough we’ve had in the whole area of fraud and the widespread use of offshore tax havens.” The IRS witnesses testified that Margolis had channeled the money of his rich clients into phony companies in the Bahamas and the Netherlands Antilles, both offshore tax havens, thereby defrauding the United States of $1.4 million in taxes.

His acquittal notwithstanding, Margolis admits that he’s spiriting his clients’ money out from beneath the noses of the taxmen. His clients, often entertainers, are actually paid by foreign-registered corporations that are in turn paid by the film companies and nightclubs where the entertainers perform. No taxes are deducted by the clubs when the checks are sent to the foreign corporations. “The tax money you earn,” Margolis explains, “will go to an area where some tax is paid, but that is a low tax area.” Margolis agrees that the system is “criminal,” and that it amounts to nothing more than a bribe by taxpayers to give small, impoverished nations a few dollars in exchange for protection from the IRS. The “crime,” however, is encouraged by the federal tax code itself.

Among the riskiest tax avoidance schemes are those that involve the failure to report income — which is consistent with the general maxim that it is better to flaunt the law than to hide from it. Those who hide their loot are called tax evaders. They are usually punished most severely by the IRS. Notable evasion cases in 1977 included:

• Val Marino, a former construction and engineering director of Avis, Inc., the car rental company that always tries harder, for failing to report $40,000 in kickbacks received from H.L. Lazar, Inc., a construction subcontracting company in New York. He was not indicted for the bribery itself.
• Andrew Tsanas, manager of maintenance and operation at J.C. Penney headquarters in New York City, for failing to pay taxes on $1.4 million in kickbacks he received from H.L. Lazar, Inc. IRS claims he owed $880,000 in taxes on the kickback. U.S. District Judge Jacob Mishler labeled Tsanas “the biggest shakedown artist to come before me.”
• Edmund O. Matzal, a New Jersey psychiatrist active nationally in Lester Maddox’s Presidential campaign on the American Independent party ticket, who refused to pay taxes because they represented “involuntary servitude” and because he opposed U.S. foreign aid to countries supporting North Vietnam.
• Leo Kornblath, a New York architect who “laundered” $36,000 in corporate money by paying it to “Happy Hooker” Xaviera Hollander for so-called interior decorating services. Hollander, a Dutch citizen and reputed brothel owner who needed to show a legitimate income to remain in the United States, returned the full amount of these checks to Kornblath, and enabled him to escape paying $13,000 taxes.
• Alleged organized crime figure Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, freed in a mistrial on charges of failing to report a large part of his income from 1971 to 1974. Salerno, the IRS contended, reported a $40,000 annual income during those years but spent “literally hundreds of thousands of dollars more.” Salerno claimed he made up the difference from accumulated cash savings.
• Anthony T. Ulasewicz, the private investigator, sentenced to a year’s probation for failing to report $45,000 he earned as the conduit for $200,000 paid to the Watergate burglars. Ulasewicz won his light sentence because he filed an amended return in 1973 on which he did pay the proper taxes and penalties.

If any general conclusion can be derived from the records of tax indictments, convications, and sentences, it is that very, very few people need worry about getting slapped by the harsh hand of the government, especially if they exercise common sense in avoiding taxes and do not become public martyrs. One IRS official in the Midwest estimates conservatively that there are about 1.6 million tax cheats in the United States. Last year a total of only 247 people were convicted after trial of tax fraud and another 1229 pleaded guilty. In short, the odds of being hit with a criminal conviction are 6639 to 1. Indeed, since fraud is the principal crime on which tax evaders and resisters are convicted, the question of intent is often far more important to the IRS prosecutors than the failure to pay taxes alone. Fraud convictions require that a jury believe the taxpayer intended to evade taxes.

So long as the independent entrepreneur records all his income, the tax authorities seem to lend an understanding ear to some very unusual expenses encountered in the process of making a profit. Witness the U.S. Tax Court’s cool acceptance last year of a convicted dope dealer’s “legitimate” business deductions. Bill Holt, convicted in El Paso, Texas, of smuggling marijuana, was sentenced to five years and ordered to pay a $30,000 fine. Holt admitted to the IRS that he had made $780,000 from dope dealing in 1972, but, he claimed, he should be allowed tax deductions for the lost marijuana and trucks seized from him by the police. No, said the tax court. Contraband and the equipment used to smuggle it could not be allowed as deductions because that would imply the court condoned illegal activity. Instead, without comment, the court did allow him to deduct $320,000 for “sales commissions,” $280,000 for “cost of goods sold (marijuana),” and $40,000 marked “driver’s expenses.” After all, the last thing the government wants to do is discourage new business opportunities.

Well, that was interesting. But let’s try to bring it up to date…

• The federal government is stricter now about allowing deductions for people whose business involves drugs prohibited by federal law — something that is making tax time difficult for medical marijuana dispensaries, for instance.
• Edward O. Matzal was sentenced to probation and eight hours of community service for not paying his taxes for three years. He died in 2010.
• Harry Margolis died of brain cancer not long after winning yet another criminal tax case against him in 1985.
• In 1992, Congress cracked down on bearer bonds (called “honor bonds” in this article).
• Stephen Angell died last year at 91. He was active with the Alternatives to Violence Project.
• I’d really like to know what ever became of “Nick Panagi” — his technique is kind of a crazy topsy-turvy version of mine and I’d be curious as to how it worked out in the long run. But he remains cloaked by pseudonym.
• Ed Guinan has been working to help poor and other disadvantaged groups in Washington, D.C. He founded the Community for Creative Non-Violence.
• I’m not sure what became of Mike and Jane Tecton. I don’t see much reference to them after this time, except one article from the 1990s in which Mike Tecton is serving as an informal legal advisor to someone representing himself in court on a firearms law violation.
• Martin Beckman is the co-author of the “show me the law” tax protester bible The Law That Never Was. The IRS seized and sold his home in 1979; the Beckmans challenged this in court, filing multiple appeals at least through 1989, but failed to convince the courts of their legal theories. He claimed to still not be filing income tax returns as late as 1988, when he was running a long-shot campaign for U.S. president.

Another now-defunct libertarian magazine, The Libertarian Review also covered the constitutionalist tax protester scene in their April 1981 issue.

One thing I noticed from that article was a coda of sorts to the Vivien Kellems story, bits and pieces of which I’ve noted here before. Kellems was an ornery libertarian sort back in the day, and her legal battles against the federal income tax make her a sort of founder or at least distinguished ancestor in the Constitutionalist sect.

Here’s how the story ends, apparently:

In the late 1960s, she finally became an overt tax rebel by refusing to surrender her records to the IRS when they questioned her deductions. In retaliation, the IRS merely disallowed all of the deductions claimed for the years in question and assessed her thousands of dollars in additional taxes, which she refused to pay. From the time of this confrontation until she died eight years later, in 1975, she filed no returns and she paid no taxes.

According to a book which encourages such anti-tax actions, The Continuing Tax Rebellion: What Millions of Americans are Doing to Restore Constitutional Government, by Martin A. Larson (Devin-Adair, 1979), she had become so sensitive a case that the IRS had decided she must not be prosecuted, and no action was taken against her. Mr. Larson goes on to state, “Shortly after her death, I received a letter from the firm of attorneys who handled her $1.8 million estate and who stated that only $265,000 had been paid the government in the complete settlement. Thus no income taxes were paid even after her death.”

In other words, Vivien Kellems, even though she never got the constitutional test case she was seeking, nevertheless made the IRS back down. Or did she? A story on tax rebels in Barron’s by James Grant, dated April 2, 1979, reported, “Last April, it was disclosed that the government had recovered some $816,949.97 from Miss Kellems’ estate.” So whatever was “settled” shortly after Kellems’s death was not really settled until the IRS had taken what it wanted.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Vickie Aldrich gives us an update on her “frivolous filing” struggle with the IRS. Aldrich accompanied her income tax returns with a letter indicating that for reasons of conscience she would not be paying the complete amount due. The IRS interpreted this as her taking a frivolous legal position and fined her ($5,000 I think) for doing so. She got the help of some law school volunteers, but seemed unable to convince anyone that she wasn’t making a legal argument at all, but merely a statement of her moral priorities. The two sides seem to have come to an agreement, in which the main sticking point for the IRS seems to have been that they wanted Aldrich to stop sending them any such letters, whether she pays her tax or not.
• Some of a 600-person-strong group of British “constitutionalist” tax protesters “stormed a courtroom and attempted to make a citizens’ arrest on a judge in support of a man challenging his council tax bill.”
• Another English couple has announced they will be refusing to pay their council tax until the government fixes a botched hazardous waste cleanup that contaminated their property.
• The IRS issues Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) to people who are required to file tax returns but who do not qualify for social security numbers. Apparently they give these out promiscuously and without much review, further encouraging the fraudulent tax refund farming industry.
• The latest “IRS building evacuated due to suspicious package” story.

One hundred years ago today Mark Wilks was arrested and sent to Brixton Prison for failing to pay his wife’s income taxes. The case became a cause célèbre in the British women’s suffrage movement and an embarrassment to the British government and its tax authorities.

This is a good example of how careful study of the law can help tax resisters find and exploit flaws that hold the tax system or its enforcement arm up to ridicule, make them unworkable, or make them vehicles for additional resistance or propaganda opportunities.

Ethel Ayres Purdie, resident tax law expert of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, discovered the vulnerability. The Income Tax Act, she wrote, “is a most fearsome piece of composition. Its language is archaic and tautological, it rises wholly superior to punctuation, and proceeds breathlessly through one hundred and ninety-four clauses.” But one of those clauses held a fatal flaw.

The “Married Woman’s Property Act” of 1882 was a reform that allowed married women to maintain control of their property rather than relinquishing it to their husbands’ control upon marriage. But the earlier (1842) Income Tax Act still considered the husband to be solely liable for the income taxes of both the husband and wife.

At first, when Elizabeth Wilks began resisting her income tax, the government responded by seizing and selling her property, but when this quirk in the law was discovered, tax resisters like Wilks protested that the government could not legally seize her property since as a married woman her taxes were legally owed by the him in the marriage. So the government went after Mark Wilks instead.

Mark Wilks, for his part, insisted that he could hardly fill out an income tax return since he had no legal right to demand information from his wife about her income! Besides, his modest income and lack of property in his own name meant that he could not afford to pay the taxes on his wife’s considerably larger income (he did pay the tax on the portion of their joint income that was attributable to his own income, though his income was low enough that by itself it would not have been taxable). “I am informed that I am liable for taxes levied on her income,” he wrote “while at the same time the law places all her property entirely beyond my control.”

Meanwhile, the Women’s Tax Resistance League trumpeted the arrest of Mark Wilks and his indefinite imprisonment — “for non-payment of taxes not his own and due on an income over which he has no control and whose amount he can only guess at” — as proving their contention that not only should women resist the income tax, but that married women were not even legally obligated to pay it and those who were paying it were operating under a legal delusion.

The imprisonment of Mark Wilks was a propaganda coup:

For what do the arrest and imprisonment of Mark Wilks mean? We are perfectly certain that it will not last long. Stupid and inept as it has been, the Government, we are certain, will not risk the odium which would justly fall upon it if this outrage on liberty went on. A Government which has much at stake and which lives by the breath of popular opinion cannot afford to ignore such strong and healthy protest as is being poured out on all sides. To us, who are in the midst of it, that which seems most remarkable is the growth of public feeling. In the streets where processions are nightly held, we were met at first by banter and rowdyism. “A man in prison for the sake of Suffragettes!” To the boy-mind of the metropolis, on the outskirts of many an earnest crowd, that seemed irresistibly funny; but thoughtfulness is spreading; into even the boy-mind, the light of truth is creeping. If it had done nothing else, the imprisonment of Mark Wilks has certainly done this — it has educated the public mind.

Wilks was released after less than a month in prison, without official explanation, and without paying the tax.

A tax resistance campaign is almost always one that butts up against the law, and it can be helpful to have campaigners who know a thing or two about legal matters. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it when she was considering a tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage in America,

One thing is certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation, and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.

Today I’ll summarize some examples of how legal study and the assistance of attorneys have made a difference in tax resistance campaigns.

Poll Tax rebels in Thatcher’s Britain

Understanding the law and the legal process was important in the poll tax rebellion — to give confidence to resisters, to support targets of government reprisals, and to make the process of tax enforcement costly and unmanageable.

Anti-poll tax volunteer Danny Burns writes:

In Bristol when the court cases started, each person with a summons, who rang into the office, was logged and sent an information pack. The same personal attention was given to people with notices from the bailiffs. At the peak of the campaign, the Bristol office was staffed morning and afternoon five days a week by different volunteers. Between February and May 1990, it was receiving over 200 calls a week. … [The volunteers included] at least five court support workers…

In every part of England and Wales local groups mobilised to provide support for non-payers in the courts. Tens, if not hundreds of activists in each region attended legal briefing sessions. These were run both by activists and sympathetic local lawyers. People were given ideas about how they might disrupt or delay the court proceedings. These included simple things, like asking for a glass of water because their throat was dry, demanding to see the identity cards of everyone present in court, to fainting in court or arranging for fire alarms to go off. People were told to demand their rights to see and read every document which was produced as evidence against them. They were also given briefings on the basic technical arguments.

By October 1990, when most of the court cases had started, virtually every Anti-Poll Tax Union in the UK had trained at least two or three of its members to become conversant with the Poll Tax law. Throughout England and Wales over a thousand people were trained to do court support work and could quote the relevant legislation. This is unique in the history of popular campaigning. The Anti-Poll Tax Unions hoped to use the legal precedent of McKenzie versus McKenzie (1970), which said that a person can “attend a trial as a friend of either party (to) take notes and quietly make suggestions and give advice to that party.” This person would be known as a “McKenzie friend.” McKenzie friends had no right to address the court, but they could advise the non-payer what to say. In this way everyone would be able to offer technical defences and thereby delay the proceedings.

The campaign needed lawyers only in the most technical cases. Lawyers were often seen as a liability, because they represented an individual client, and it was in their interest to get through the procedure as quickly as possible. It was in the campaign’s interest for everything to proceed as slowly as possible. Nevertheless, legal knowledge and guidance was essential. This arrived with the creation of the Poll Tax Legal Group… [which] researched legislation and case law. It set up a network of lawyers throughout England and Wales who could support the legal challenges of Anti-Poll Tax groups and produced over 30 accessible legal bulletins on the Poll Tax and a book called To Pay or Not To Pay. These underpinned the legal needs of the movement and helped ordinary people to get to grips with the law they needed to use.

Delaying tactics were mixed with serious legal technicalities. Councils were challenged for sending notices to the wrong addresses. Given the rate at which people moved houses, it was difficult for the councils to keep up, and as a result many cases were dropped because people hadn’t received proper notice. Big legal challenges were also made over “correct procedures.” These came in the first few weeks and resulted mostly from the inexperience of councils in dealing with this sort of process. The first day of Medina Council’s cases (on the Isle of Wight) is probably the most famous example. The reminder notices were sent out with second class stamps, they consequently arrived late, people didn’t receive the statutory notice which they were entitled to, and the court threw out all 1,900 cases. The council had to start again.

When police attacked an anti-poll tax demonstration in London, many of the demonstrators fought back, and hundreds were arrested. Elements of the campaign leadership distanced themselves from the defendants, embarrassed to have the campaign associated with violence. So other activists helped to form and coordinate an independent group — the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign — with the following mandate:

The campaign will:

1. Unconditionally defend all of those arrested on March 31^st.
2. Be controlled by and be accountable to the defendants
3. Be totally independent of any other organisation.
4. Seek support from the whole Anti-Poll Tax movement and all other sympathetic organisations.
5. Seek to co-ordinate the legal defence of all those arrested.
6. Seek to build a coherent picture of events of 31/3/90 from the point of view of those arrested.
7. Publicise the points of view of defendants.
8. Raise money for a bust fund, controlled by the defendants to cover their legal and welfare costs.
9. Ensure that at all future Anti-Poll Tax events there will be proper legal cover and support for anyone arrested. This will include an office and workers to visit places of detention and look after prisoners’ welfare.

Danny Burns again:

About a dozen people volunteered to carry out the court monitoring process. They attended every hearing, systematically took notes of everything that was said, recorded the numbers of police officers and approached the defendants asking them to attend the now weekly TSDC meetings… By the summer, over 250 of the defendants had been contacted.

The TSDC ran advice sessions on prison, produced legal briefing notes and mailed out the minutes of the weekly meetings to every defendant every week. A solicitors’ group was established with a core of three, but at the peak of early activity they managed to get over fifteen solicitors involved. This proved important because the solicitors’ group managed to get hold of over 50 hours of police videos and handed them over to the campaign. The police videos were crucial in getting a lot of people off, and a number of people in the campaign worked extremely hard editing videos and rejigging them for particular trials. The solicitors’ group also got the Crown Prosecution Service to hand over a full list of all of the defendants and the names and addresses of their lawyers. The lawyers were all contacted and, although many were initially reluctant to co-operate with the campaign, they soon realised that TSDC had a lot of information which their clients needed.

The Dublin water charge strike

In the campaign against the Dublin water charge in the 1990s, the resisters used the legal system as another avenue of protest and resistance. The Secretary of the Federation of Dublin Anti Water Charge Campaigns recalls:

Every possible legal angle was pursued by the campaign’s legal team — down to legal definitions of what constituted a householder, making the councils prove that the person they had summonsed actually lived at the address, that they owned the property, etc., etc. We weren’t doing this because we had any illusions in the impartiality of the court system. We knew that even though we were successful in finding various legal loopholes these would all be closed one by one and that the judges would be doing their best to facilitate the councils. This was demonstrated most clearly when a judge in Swords invoked the Public Order Act to close several streets around the courthouse to prevent a protest outside it.

But by contesting every detail of every summons we could make the system unworkable. There were tens of thousands of non-payers. After several months the councils had only managed to get a couple of dozen cases through the courts. Someone calculated that at the rate they were managing to proceed it would take them something like 220 years to process all the cases. And it was costing them more in legal fees than they could ever hope to take back in charges — even if they managed to bully everyone into paying.

Any time the council did manage to get a court order, it was appealed — again the objective being to clog up the system.

George Cony’s aggressive lawyers

When Oliver Cromwell knocked the English king off his throne, he did so in part in the cause of Parliamentary democracy. Upon assuming charge of the English government, however, he grew impatient with Parliament and decided to enact some taxes on his own.

One of Cromwell’s more radical supporters, George Cony, taking Cromwell at his word (Cromwell had said that “the subject who submits to an illegal impost is more an enemy of his country than the tyrant who imposes it”) decided to refuse to pay one of these arbitrary taxes.

Cony’s lawyers argued his case so successfully that Cony’s tax evasion case threatened to call the legal underpinnings of Cromwell’s regime into question. The judges in the case seemed sympathetic, and Cromwell was so alarmed that he had all three lawyers imprisoned in the Tower of London until they repented, upon which the chief-justice who was hearing the case resigned.

Hugh Williams and the Rebecca rioters

Radical lawyer Hugh Williams was of great help to the Rebecca movement in Wales — some say he was more than a legal advisor, but one of the instigators of the movement, or even “Rebecca” herself! One account says: “[Williams] did all the legal work for the rioters, also drafting various petitions for them. He was a prominent member of the Chartist movement, acting as their solicitor, and he defended the prisoners at Welshpool Assizes in July, 1839, for taking part in the Chartist Riots. He rendered similar services to the Rebecca prisoners gratuitously; but was eventually reported to the Lord Chancellor and struck off the Rolls. He, however, continued to do a considerable amount of legal work, and whenever it became necessary for him to appear in court, he invariably employed [another attorney] to appear for him.”

His familiarity with the law and the legal process helped him help the Rebeccaites translate their grievances into formal petitions, which in turn helped the Rebeccaite “people power” movement effect change in government policy.

White supremacists in Reconstruction-era Louisiana

When white supremacists in New Orleans decided to actively withdraw their consent from the mixed-race Reconstruction government of “scalawags” and “carpet-baggers” there in 1872, they formed “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation” and declared a tax strike.

Fifty-eight New Orleans attorneys signed the following statement of support:

The undersigned attorneys at law, citizens of New Orleans, engage themselves, without compensation, and as a matter of public service, to defend professionally all citizens, residents, or property-holders in this city, who shall desire their assistance in resisting the collection by municipal authorities of the taxes known as the “school-tax,” the “park-tax,” and the “metropolitan-police tax,” and other taxes the collection of which may be lawfully resisted.

The Smith sisters of Glastonbury

Abby & Julia Smith refused to pay taxes to a local government that denied women the vote and that took advantage of this by excessively taxing women’s property in order to ease the tax burden on male voters and to redistribute the money to male patronage recipients. In response, the government periodically seized and auctioned off the Smith sisters’ cows (“Votey” and “Taxey”). That failing to discourage the Smiths, the town decided to fight dirty, and the Smiths fought back legally in a way that brought further attention to their cause:

[A]n inconspicuous advertisement in the Hartford Courant announced the sale at public auction of fifteen acres of Smith pasture land on June 20, a date contrived to fall just before the grass would be cut. Though the sisters set out on that day with ample funds, the collector adroitly shifted the meeting place, and when the two women caught up with the auction, the gavel had just gone down transferring for $78.35 land worth nearly $2,000 to none other than a covetous neighbor who had tried for years to get possession of it.

Abby and Julia were daughters of a lawyer. They brought suit against tax collector George C. Andrews on the grounds that he had violated a law which plainly stated that movable property must first be sold for unpaid taxes before real estate could be seized. The case was tried in the home of Judge Hollister of Glastonbury, who gave a verdict in favor of the sisters and fined Andrews damages of $10. Threatening terrible consequences, Andrews appealed the case.

The new trial, which lasted three days in the Hartford Court of Common Pleas, had a farcical aspect. There were misplaced records; there was distorted evidence. The judge, in absentia, reversed the Glastonbury decision and decided in favor of collector Andrews. At this point the Smiths’ lawyer backed out. Abby and Julia, both now in their eighties, began the study of law with the intention of conducting their own case. Happily a capable lawyer finally agreed to place a second appeal before the Court of Equity.

For two years a wide and sympathetic public followed this devious litigation. Across the nation, even in England and France, editors and columnists lauded the Glastonbury cows in prose and poetry. Reporters visited the town, drank tea in the elm-shaded farmhouse, admired the cows, polled public opinion in Glastonbury, and returned with highly flavored and often inaccurate stories. With whatever condescension these reporters arrived, they seem, one and all, to have found the Smith sisters irresistible. The hospitality, wit, and charm of the two elderly spinsters captivated the world beyond Glastonbury.

When the final verdict was made in their favor, in November of 1876, women the country over rejoiced. To be sure, Julia and Abby did not vote in Glastonbury, but from that time on their property was undisturbed.

The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement

The current Greek “Won’t Pay” movement, which is resisting a number of stealth taxes the government has added to things like utility bills and road tolls, has also carried its struggle into court — at one point winning an injunction that forbade the state power company from cutting the power of people who were refusing to pay the new utility bill tax.

Newly-enfranchised Pennsylvania women

When women in Pennsylvania won the vote, many discovered to their chagrin that they had also become subject to taxes to which they had previously been immune. Thousands of them, deciding the package was not worth it, decided to refuse to pay.

And they were able to take advantage of a quirk in an 1834 law that did not permit the authorities to send women to prison (though they could imprison men) for tax refusal:

Nothing herein contained shall authorize the arrest or imprisonment for non-payment of any tax of any female or infant or person found by inquisition to be of unsound mind.

It took a few years for the state legislature to pass a law allowing for the jailing of women who refused to pay their taxes.

Maurice McCrackin’s lawyers

Not all legal help is helpful. When American war tax resister Maurice McCrackin was convicted of refusing to cooperate with an IRS summons, he was following a strategy of complete noncooperation that he kept following right into the courtroom — where he refused to stand for the judge, refused to plead to the charges, refused to answer questions, refused to consult with his court-appointed attorney, fasted while behind bars, and had to be wheeled into and out from his court appearances because he wouldn’t walk there under his own power.

For the same reason, upon his conviction, he emphatically said that he was not interested in pursuing an appeal: “I said I wanted to file no appeal, nor did I want steps taken to keep the door open, so an appeal could be perfected later. I do not recognize any appeal on my behalf… My position is not changed. This is a moral, not a legal, struggle.”

One of the lawyers who had been assigned to defend him, however, convinced that the judge had betrayed bias against McCracken in his statements from the bench, said that he intended to appeal anyway.

“Constitutionalist” tax protesters

And then there are the “Constitutionalist” “show me the law!”-style tax protesters. For years they have been bedeviling the IRS with their baroque, ever-evolving, quasi-legal arguments and pleadings based on the real Constitution, or common law, or tortured interpretations of excerpts from a variety of cherry-picked statutes and court rulings.

While they typically know just enough about the law to get into trouble, without knowing enough to get out again, there’s no question that they cause headaches a-plenty for the powers that be. Alas, this does not seem to actually be their objective. Instead, they seem convinced that they’re not just whistling Dixie, but they’re right, and if they can just figure out how to pick the lock of the court system with the right argument, they’ll be able to walk out free into a new world where their Constitution holds sway and the perverters of the true law are vanquished.

Alas, most of what they have discovered is an enormous and inventive catalog of things that don’t work, so in spite of all of their creativity and effort, they have given the rest of us little to work with. But if you ever have a “that’s so crazy it just might work!” idea about going up against the IRS, you might want to research these folks first — they may have already tried it.

And every once in a while they rack up a courtroom victory — not often one that amounts to much in real terms, but it fuels the movement. One observer of the movement reacted to a twist of this sort by saying: “This is going to encourage thousands more people who were on the fence, who were paying taxes only because they were afraid they would be criminally prosecuted. If too many people do this, the tax system will collapse because it is based on people voluntarily complying.”

(I’m most familiar with the U.S. variety, but similar groups exist in Canada, the U.K., and probably elsewhere. Earlier this year in England, for instance, hundreds of Constitutionalist tax protesters stormed a courtroom where one of their number was on trial, whereupon they attempted to put the judge under citizens arrest, and began making their own rulings from the bench!)

Tax resistance campaigns have found it useful to identify resonances with popular myths, esteemed tax rebellions of yore, and semi-fictional heroes. Here are some examples:

• Just about every tax revolt in the United States (and many elsewhere as well) appropriates the example of the Boston Tea Party as an evocative reminder of a grassroots uprising, the recent “Taxed Enough Already” TEA Party movement being just the latest of many, many examples.



• In Spain, the tancament de caixes plays a similar role to the Tea Party in America, with modern Spanish tax resisters comparing their campaigns with that legendary struggle. In England (and the British empire), John Hampden has long been the exemplar of choice, with his example being used from South Africa to Ireland to India to prove that celebrated patriots can refuse to pay their taxes.
• The phrase “no taxation without representation” has such resonance, especially in the descendant nations of the British Empire, that it gets trotted out even to support tax resistance campaigns in which representation isn’t really an issue at all. It was especially potent in the American revolution and in the women’s suffrage movements.
• The Rebecca Rioters in Wales, painting their faces and dressing in drag to destroy tollgates and mete out justice in the middle of the nineteenth century, were tapping into a folkloric form of grassroots justice that was centuries old. “Jack a Lents” painted their faces and dressed in women’s clothing to tear down turnpikes in England a century before, and I’ve found references to protesters led by men in women’s clothing and using the shared pseudonym of “Lady Skimmington” in the Western Rising in England a century before that.
• Resistance to the “Foreign Miners Tax” in California in 1850 gave birth to the myth of Joaquin Murieta, a sort of Robin Hood-like outlaw who became a desperado when he was forced off his claim by the tax.
• The Robin Hood myth itself has taken on a tax resistance theme in recent years. The popular Disney animated version of the Robin Hood story makes the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham a tax collector, and Robin Hood’s robbery of him a case of redistributing the taxes back to the people they’d been seized from:

  While he taxes us to pieces
    And he robs us of our bread
  King Richard’s crown keeps slippin’ down
    Around that pointed head
  Ah! But while there is a merry man
    in Robin’s wily pack
  We’ll find a way to make him pay
    And steal our money back

• Urban legends helped to fuel tax resistance during the French Revolution. Rumors that the King had abolished taxes led people to refuse payment or to destroy the obsolete offices and apparatus of taxation. Here is a similar example from Russia (as found in James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance):

  After the emancipation [of the serfs] in 1861, the peasants in Biezdne (Kazan Province) were demoralized to discover that with redemption payments, labor dues, and taxes their burdens were, if anything, heavier than before. When one of their number claimed that the emancipation decree granted them complete freedom from such dues — the term volia (freedom) appeared in many contexts in the decree — but that the squires and officials had kept it from being implemented, they leapt at the opportunity, now sanctioned from on high, to refuse payment.

  The myth of the czar’s benevolence, which was of course promoted by the czarist government, could backfire in this way when peasants refused to pay onerous taxes or obey other commands of the czar’s subordinates, under the theory that because the czar was so good he could not possibly have ordered such terrible things:

  Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the myth was its plasticity in the hands of its peasant adherents. First and foremost, it was an invitation to resist any or all of the czar’s supposed agents, who could not have been carrying out the good czar’s wishes if they imposed heavy taxes, conscription, rents, military corvée, and so forth. If the czar only knew of the crimes his faithless agents were committing in his name, he would punish them and rectify matters. When petitions failed and oppression continued, it may simply have indicated that an impostor — a false czar — was on the throne. In such cases, the peasants who joined the banners of a rebel claiming to be the true czar would be demonstrating their loyalty to the monarchy. … In a form of symbolic jujitsu, an apparently conservative myth counseling passivity becomes a basis for defiance and rebellion…

• Scott also talks (e.g. in his paper Everyday Forms of Resistance) about how “much of the folk culture of the peasant ‘little tradition’ amounts to a legitimation, or even a celebration, of [resistance]…”

  In this and other ways (e.g. tales of bandits, tricksters, peasant heroes, religious myths, carnivalesque parodies of authorities) the peasant subculture helps to underwrite dissimulation, poaching, theft, tax evasion, evasion of conscription, and so on. While folk culture is not coordinational in any formal sense, it often achieves a “climate of opinion” which, in other more institutionalized societies, might require a public relations campaign.

• The very name “Poll Tax,” which came to be the most widely-accepted name for what Thatcher’s government hoped would go down as the “community charge,” was a potent propaganda coup for the resistance movement. Danny Burns, a chronicler of that successful tax rebellion, says that “the story of [Wat Tyler’s] peasants revolt against the Poll Tax in 1381 was told in virtually every meeting. Calling on these traditions was an important part of explaining why non-cooperation was needed…” Signs that people would hang in their windows reading “No Poll Tax Here” also hearkened back to the tax resistance accompanying the Reform Act agitation in the 1830s.
• Today, tax resistance actions like the ongoing Household Tax resistance in Ireland compare themselves in turn to the successful Poll Tax revolt.
• The Lady Godiva myth concerns a “noblewoman who, according to legend, rode naked through the streets of Coventry in order to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation imposed by her husband on his tenants.”
• A motley variety of myths about “common law,” about the True Constitution, about the significance of fringed edges to flags, and other what-not, fuel the often bizarre Constitutionalist tax protester movement in the United States.

Tax agencies live by bureaucracy and paperwork. Many of the earliest examples of writing in the worlds’ museums are tax records. But some mischievous tax resisters have discovered that this is a vulnerability that can be targeted.

For example, Last month, a video blogger going by the name “StormCloudsGathering” considered the idea of “filling out thousands of random tax returns with nonexistent names and numbers… so suddenly they get flooded with a bunch of returns that don’t make sense…”:

What’s even more brilliant about [this] option is that even non-U.S. citizens — people living in other countries — could participate. You could send in hundreds of tax returns even if you’re an Indonesian. You know: Americans can live in Indonesia, and they’re required to file taxes… there’s no way for them to be sure, just because it’s coming from Indonesia, that it’s not a valid tax return. They would have to do the investigation, and that costs resources.

He recommends filing in the name of particular, offensive, multinational corporations, but I think the average person would have a difficult time filing a sufficiently complex return to serve as a convincing decoy in such a case. Another option would be to file corporate returns for nonexistent corporations, or individual returns for phantom (or dead) people.

War tax resister Ed Hedemann has already made plans for what he calls “zombie war tax resistance” — filling in years of tax returns ahead of time and putting them in pre-stamped envelopes so that his survivors can continue to file (but, of course, refuse to pay!) after he’s gone. “Why give the government a break from having to deal with your resistance when you die?” he asks.

Hedemann also makes a point of periodically filing Freedom of Information Act requests for any information the IRS and other government agencies have been collecting about his activities — hundreds of pages — and he’s put together a guide for other tax resisters to follow in making their own requests.

Currently in the U.S. there is an epidemic of tax fraud in which the fraudsters file for phony tax refunds in the names (and taxpayer identification numbers) of other, real people. This often causes the tax collection bureaucracy to swing into action against the victims of the identity theft, which is both a waste of resources and a way of further alienating the population from the government and its tax bureaucracy — potentially a model that a tax resistance campaign could benefit from.

The IRS has made a big shift in recent years from processing paper income tax returns, filled out by hand, to electronic filing. This is more efficient for the agency, as it no longer has to hire as many people to laboriously transcribe the numbers from paper returns into its computer databases. The agency estimated that it cost about 35¢ on average for the agency to process an electronically-filed return, compared to an average of $2.87 for a paper return.

This suggests that one way to make a minor dent in the agency’s budget and efficiency is simply to file paper returns rather than file electronically (this is still a legal option for individual filers, even those who go to professional tax preparers). But if this became a strategy of a mass-campaign it could even cripple the tax collecting bureaucracy. George Jakabcin, IRS assistant deputy associate chief information officer for systems integration, said in 2008 that the agency “would be in a world of hurt” if even half of the people who had switched to electronic filing at that time decided to switch back. “We no longer have the capability to process the additional 43 million returns manually. We no longer have the facilities, we don’t have the IT infrastructure in place to support them, we don’t have the people, and some would argue that we are beginning to lose the expertise.”

The IRS has tried to crack down on people who send them paperwork just to waste their time. They have come up with something called the “frivolous filing penalty” and can use this to ding you $5,000 each time you file any sort of paperwork with them that takes a position they consider to be “frivolous.” They can do this immediately and on the whim of whichever bureaucrat is handling your forms, without going to court, and you are only allowed to appeal your fine before a judge if you pay it first!

War tax resister Karl Meyer wasn’t about to let the IRS think it could intimidate him with such tactics. So in 1984, when the “Cabbage Patch Kids” dolls (each one slightly different) had become ubiquitous, he invented when he called “cabbage patch resistance” — filing a different, blatantly “frivolous” tax return every day. He was assessed $140,000 in penalties in 1984 alone (though the penalty was only $500 back then). The IRS never collected the money though. The best it could manage was to seize and sell his car, for a little over $1,000.

“Constitutionalist” and “sovereign citizen”-style tax protest groups in the U.S. are fond of harassing tax officials and other government employees with lawsuits, liens, bogus quasi-official court filings, and so forth. In one example, Eddie Kahn’s “Guiding Light of God Ministries,” filed some 2,000 misconduct complaints against IRS agents. A newspaper article about a subsequent legal case against the group noted that:

Some agents have said that their supervisors ordered them to back off from audits or collection efforts in the face of [such] threats, just to avoid investigations by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

Some paperwork tricks are more like “hacking” in that they treat the IRS as a system that processes input and produces output, and note that certain examples of pathological input can result in output unanticipated by the system designers. For example, the IRS gave out $20 million dollars in the 2008 filing season when people figured out that if they substantially overpaid a tax return with a bad check, the IRS would cut them a hefty refund check before they noticed they’d been had.

Here are some more examples of paperwork hacks being used against the tax collecting bureaucracy:

• South Carolina’s state government recently passed a law that required all organizations that “directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing, or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina, or any political division thereof,” to register their activities with the South Carolina Secretary of State and pay a five-dollar filing fee. A member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left (which probably qualifies, at least in its more ambitious moments) decided to register, but with a twist:

  When belligerence and inhumanity prevail, the peaceful and the humane must find honor in being categorized as the enemies of the prevailing order. Please keep me updated as to the status of our registration. I look forward to hearing back from you as to our official recognition as enemies of your state and its government. … P.S. I am told that there is a processing fee in the amount of $5.00 for the registration of a subversive organization. Our organization is in fact so dastardly that we have refused to remit the fee.

• Prussian farmers in 1922 used the bureaucracy against itself. A New York Times report noted:

  [T]he big agrarians… are determined to resort to sabotage of all the tax laws…

  [A correspondent in East Prussia says] “They have all filed protests and demanded that they be relieved from paying the tax until the protests are settled. That means a delay of at least three years in collecting the taxes, and it is said that the Provincial Treasury is inclined to grant this request. The big agrarians declared that they would do the same thing with all the tax laws. In Berlin the people might decree what pleased them, they (the agrarians) would not pay the taxes or subscribe to the compulsory loans. They want to sabotage the whole taxation system that they hate, and consequently they want to make so much work for the Treasury officers that the latter don’t know which way to turn.”

• During the Beit Sahour tax strike against the Israeli occupation, Elias Rishmawi worked to get a suit challenging the legality of the tax accepted by Israel’s court system. He remembers: “I had never had an illusion that the Israeli supreme court would give any justice to Palestinians. … [T]he appeal formed the legal coverage by which I and others were able to continue resisting from one side not paying taxes, since there is a case in court and they cannot force me pay until the case is solved they cannot take any actions against us since we have this case, and we kept challenging the system through different means.… This was impossible to achieve without the legal coverage of the supreme court. Because then, I and the others, would have been considered as inciters and then might be imprisoned for ten years. That’s why we needed that coverage.”
• An early form of resistance to Thatcher’s Poll Tax was called the “send it back” campaign. The idea was that people would register for the tax, as required, but would accompany their registration with questions that would require further manual processing by the individual councils that were processing the tax:

  Government regulations state: “…if for any reason you consider that you are not a ‘responsible person’ please let me know and return the form to me without completing it.” Stop It wants people to take up this offer by writing to ask if they should be the “responsible person” and suggests they ask who will have access to the information supplied and why the authorities require exact dates of birth. The implementation of the tax was dependent on an accurate register and the protest campaign could make the register “wildly inaccurate,”… Labour MP Brian Wilson, chairman of [the anti-poll tax campaign called] Stop It, said: “It is a campaign of obstruction within the law that does not lead people to incur the substantial penalties that are built into the legislation.” The aim was to have the legislation amended or abandoned.

  For this and other reasons, the councils were inundated with paperwork, for which they were unprepared. “Councils sat under a mountain of paper. Everything they did seemed to create more work,” wrote campaign historian Danny Burns. He quotes from the Poll Tax Legal Group:

  The paper-work involved with administering the charge is enormous — and likely to get worse. Backlogs switch from one area of activity to another. Indeed, local authorities cannot really do anything without generating more paper-work.

• Kate Harvey, a tax resister for women’ suffrage in 1913, once wrote: “I have just received the first demand note for this year’s taxes. I have torn it up, put it in the envelope in which it came, and re-posted it to the Tax Collector. I suppose it is now reposing in his rubbish basket.”
• The Association of Real Estate Taxpayers in Chicago during the Great Depression led tens of thousands of property owners to demand reassessments of their property, which effectively swamped the Board of Review and allowed the property owners to legally delay tax payment.

When you’re trying to expand the ranks of tax resisters in your campaign, you need good educational tools. People are often reluctant to resist either because they aren’t sure how to go about it, or because they only have a vague idea of the likely consequences (and so are likely to exaggerate their frightfulness).

When NWTRCC conducted a survey of non-resisting anti-war activists a few years back, the most popular answer to the question “Which resources would help you decide to participate [in a tax resistance campaign]?” was: “clear idea of likely consequences” and the two top responses to the question about “the most important reason you have not done war tax resistance” were “fear legal consequences” and “need more information.”

People like to stick with the familiar, and if you ask them to take a jump into the unknown, they will imagine the worst as a way to justify their reticence. If you can be clear, thorough, and credible in demonstrating how to resist and what the consequences are likely to be, you can eliminate the biggest obstacle to the growth of your campaign.

This is easier said than done, however. It can be difficult to be clear and thorough if you are going up against a tax agency that is arbitrary or that changes its rules suddenly, and it can take time to establish credibility.

Today I’ll give a few examples of how tax resistance campaigns have dispelled ignorance about tax resistance.

• Ethel Ayers Purdie ran what she called the “Women Taxpayer’s Agency” and counseled British women’s suffrage activists both on how to best resist their taxes on no-taxation-without-representation grounds, and on how they could exploit legal quirks to avoid taxes (for instance, archaic laws that made husbands wholly legally liable for their wives’ taxes). She also published a pamphlet about that particular legal quirk, which concluded:

  Many married women, including leading actresses, doctors, titled women, business women, and various others having property, businesses, investments, &c., or being in receipt of salaries, have succeeded in demonstrating their non-taxability, and thereby involved the Revenue in a total loss of the tax illegally charged on them.

  Members of the Women’s Tax Resistance League regularly gave lectures on their tactic of choice at suffragist meetings, and thereby recruited new resisters.
• The American war tax resistance group NWTRCC publishes a number of specialized how-to pamphlets that cover various techniques of tax resistance (such as refusing to file, filing and refusing to pay, living on a non-taxable income) and strategies for coping with possible consequences (such as government collection efforts). They also have a nationwide network of people who offer one-on-one counseling sessions for potential resisters or for current resisters who are running into snags. Local groups in the network periodically run workshops at which people can come to learn about the variety of war tax resistance methods and ask questions of people who have experience with them.
• The current tax resistance movement in Spain, which has its roots in the war tax resistance movement there but which has expanded to a broader anti-government pro-autonomy critique, recently published half a million copies of a tabloid that included its call to resist alongside some practical instruction on how to go about resisting both the pay-as-you-earn income tax and the value-added tax.
• American constitutionalist, “show-me-the-law”-style tax protest often spreads by means of workshops run by self-styled experts who have discovered or invented new (and increasingly baroque) legal arguments that prove that most people are not legally liable to pay the federal income tax. Although these arguments don’t typically stand up in court, they are sufficiently credible to the lay audience that they can convince many people to begin resisting. For example, in the early 1980s, an epidemic of tax protest swept General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, as thousands of employees there told GM to stop withholding income tax from their salaries after they attended seminars or listened to lectures on tape from the tax protester group “We The People ACT.”



• Resisters to Thatcher’s Poll Tax gained confidence thanks to the efforts of the Poll Tax Legal Group which, among other things, “produced over 30 accessible legal bulletins on the Poll Tax and a book called To Pay or Not To Pay.” To combat the threat of property seizure — often the threat itself was enough to intimidate people into stopping their resistance — the movement made efforts to educate the public about the seizure process and about ways to frustrate it:

  [T]he first task of Anti-Poll Tax Unions was to inform people about what the bailiffs could and couldn’t do. In Scotland, people were advised not to tell the sheriffs where they worked, not to tell them which banks they used, and not, under any circumstances, to let them into their houses. They were also told to inform the local group as soon as the sheriffs threatened anything. The Anti-Poll Tax Unions advised people to move possessions to local friends’ houses before the date of the poinding and offered to help with the moving. People were told to leave their cars well away from their homes. They were informed that a wrongful poinding could be appealed against and, in many cases, this was done successfully. People were also told how to avoid bailiff action by signing away their possessions to people who lived outside of the area or, preferably, to their children. There are now young children who technically own all of their parents’ possessions.

  Some local law centres went onto the offensive against the bailiffs, providing information to the public, which totally undermined their actions. One morning in May 1991, the bailiffs delivered over 4,000 intimidation notices to people throughout Bristol. By 7:30 a.m. the law centre had heard about this and contacted all local radio stations. By 8:00 p.m. the news bulletins which went out every fifteen minutes, reported:

  Today bailiffs have delivered notices for payment to over 4,000 people in Bristol. A spokesperson from the law centre said that they were illegal and should be ignored.

  So most people ignored them.

• The Bardoli satyagraha depended on regular distribution of news bulletins from campaign headquarters to the scattered villages of the province, to make sure everyone was on the same page about strategy, and to counteract government propaganda and rumor. These also came to be powerful propaganda tools to affect Indian opinion outside of the resisting region:

  A campaign like this could not be carried on without a publicity department. The peasants could not be asked to subscribe to daily papers or even to the weekly Navajivan, and outside papers could at best give an outside view of the campaign. A publicity office was therefore opened with Sjt. Jugatram Dave at its head. With an artist’s pen and with a knowledge of the whole taluka [district] at his fingertips, he took to this work like a duck to water. The arrangement was to issue a daily news bulletin and publish Sjt. Vallabhbhai’s speeches in pamphlet form and to distribute them free to the agriculturists all over the taluka: For four or five days cyclostyled [mimeograph-like] copies were issued, but arrangement was soon made to get them printed daily at Surat, and a start was made with 5,000 copies. The arrangement answered most admirably, the villagers waiting anxiously for the patrikas every morning and devouring the contents with avidity. All the Gujarati and almost all the English dailies of Bombay reproduced them verbatim, and as the movement gathered force, every important town and village in Gujarat began to get copies of the bulletin with the result that over and above ten thousand copies distributed in Bardoli, four thousand copies were subscribed to by places outside.

A few more interesting bits and pieces that flew past my eyeballs in recent weeks:

• Ever wonder what all those acronyms and code numbers mean on your IRS transcripts and other correspondence? If so, take a look at IRS Processing Codes and Information. The cover page is marked with the delightful message “ATTENTION: OFFICIAL USE ONLY — WHEN NOT IN USE, THIS DOCUMENT MUST BE STORED IN ACCORDANCE WITH IRM 11.3.12, MANAGER’S SECURITY HANDBOOK. Information that is of a sensitive nature is marked by the pound sign (#).” However, it is publicly available on the IRS website, and some of it is redacted, so I don’t think there are any national security secrets within.
• Someone posted scans of a “Political Art Documentation / Distribution” zine, the first issue of which was devoted to the subject of “Death and Taxes” that celebrated an art show of the same name: “From April 1–18, 1981, P.A.D. presented a public art event called Death and Taxes, to protest the use of taxes for military spending and cutbacks in social services… Twenty artists installed works in and out of doors in Manhattan and Brooklyn… The event included posters, graffiti, stickers, overprinted 1040 forms redistributed in banks, typed dollar bills, street theatre, outdoor films, environments, and performances.” Lots of punk rock aesthetic stuff with a war tax protest theme.
• The constitutionalist, “show me the law”-style tax protesters (or “tax deniers,” as the IRS spins it), which have long been an entertaining staple of the scene in the United States, are apparently becoming a rapidly-spreading phenomenon in Canada as well. “The National Post has identified 385 pending tax cases — most using florid and arcane language and claiming bizarre laws that supersede or nullify Canada’s regulations and laws; it prompted the Tax Court to adopt a triage approach to cope with the deluge, grouping cases and directing them to specific judges.”
• When tax auditors showed up at a restaurant in Archanon, Greece, last month, “there were strong reactions from customers in a large tavern, leading the auditors of the Financial Crimes unit to quickly leave.”
• Thanos Tzimeros, founder of the fledgling Greek political party “Recreate Greece,” has issued a call for tax resistance — or “robbery resistance” as he puts it. His perspective is a bit different from that of the largely leftish “don’t pay” movement. Rather than opposing the austerity and public-sector shrinking that Greece has been strong-armed into accepting by international lenders, he thinks these reforms haven’t gone nearly far enough and that the problem with Greece is that it is being strangled by a political/criminal class. If I’m parsing a Google Translate version of the Greek news article correctly, Tzimeros is encouraging people to pay their taxes into an escrow account and to refuse to turn the money over to the government until such time as it can give a satisfactory accounting of how it spends its budget. He points to bloated and redundant government agencies as examples of taxpayer money being siphoned off to fund a class of parasitical political appointees.
• Here’s the official IRS Office of Chief Counsel memorandum in which the Counsel reminds IRS employees that they cannot willy-nilly assess “frivolous filing” penalties on people who include letters of political protest along with their (otherwise accurate and complete) tax forms. And here is Peter J. Reilly’s take on the case at his Forbes blog.
• And here is another example of governments rigging traffic lights and automatic ticket-generating cameras in a way that makes intersections more dangerous… but more profitable to the taxers.
• NWTRCC has produced a set of war tax resistance talking points for media interviews that might help war tax resisters get their point of view across more effectively through the news media.
• Ruth Benn reflects on her war tax resistance, and the hapless but persistent response from the IRS, at NWTRCC’s new blog, War Tax Talk.

In its April 1976 issue, Reason magazine published an article by Karl J. Bray about tax resistance, called “Taxes Are Revolting!”

Bray was one of the founders of the U.S. Libertarian Party. He was also a tax protester of the “the federal income tax is unconstitutional and I can prove it” school. He did about as well as most people do with that argument, and was appealing his latest criminal conviction at the time of his death in 1978.

I find the American constitutionalist tax protester movement to be kind of monotonous. But the Reason article has some interest. For one thing, it introduced me to Mogens Gilstrup, of whom I was able to find a more complete description elsewhere:

Mogens Gilstrup led the Anti-tax Party called the Progress Party in Denmark. The party sought virtual elimination of all taxes in Denmark. It wanted to privatize almost all activities of the Government. The party even advocated that the defence budget should be reduced to only enough money to pay for an answering machine that would tell any caller “We capitulate” [in Russian!] It contested elections for the Folketing (Danish Parliament) in 1973 and received a sizable support of 15.9 per cent of the total votes polled and was then second largest party in the country. It managed to get about 13 per cent of votes in two subsequent elections also. Later, when the ruling government reduced the income tax rates considerably, the significance of the anti-tax party also got reduced. Meanwhile, its leader Gilstrup was jailed for tax evasion. Probably he may be one of the very few persons who evaded taxes openly (declared by him in a television interview) and faced punishment. However, the Progress Party continues to mobilize citizens against high taxes.

Gilstrup and his party appear to have mostly sidelined their anti-tax roots in favor of an anti-immigrant nationalism and racism, and the Progress Party has declined to asterisk status.

What also interests me about the article is the way Bray describes the tax protester movement of the time. Most adherents of this belief system today restrict themselves to explaining why they think the tax system is illegal and why tax refusal is therefore a legal response. Bray instead highlights the tax protesters as a resistance movement fighting against noxious government policies:

The September 17, 1973, issue of U.S. News & World Report states that:

A tax-dodging spree, spreading rapidly, is costing the Government in Washington at least 6 billion dollars a year and threatening to get completely out of control. Tax experts outside the IRS… put the real losses as high as five times that much, around 30 billion a year.

This was shocking news in 1973, but today one simply has to purchase the latest edition of Tax Strike News, a monthly tabloid in the forefront of the tax battle, to discover that hundreds of organizations have been formed nationwide to help disseminate the "new religion" of the tax strikers, The size and scope of the movement to abolish taxes has grown to such an extent that virtually every Western State now has a “citizens posse” organized to apprehend and try tax collectors who abrogate the constitutional principle of due process.

Some adherents of lawful tax resistance identify themselves as followers of the early colonial tax protesters like Thomas Paine and Sam Adams, and there is a large and newly emerging segment in the movement which calls novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand its intellectual mentor. But in common they have been heard to tell IRS agents: “Go straight to hell, do not pass go, and do not collect $200.” [Something Bray himself wrote on his tax return in lieu of the figures the government instructed him to write there.]

There is little doubt that the movement is growing, and its leaders believe that the 16^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which authorizes the income tax, will soon fall, as did the 18^th amendment enacting Prohibition. It is historical fact that the 18^th amendment was repealed because millions of Americans refused to comply and the enforcement machinery could not deal with this. We may even find that the same individualistic Americans who started drinking bootleg booze in order to thwart the revenuers will stop paying income taxes for the same reason.

Note the emphasis on resisting in order to have the 16^th amendment made a dead letter by the pressure of citizen protest — whereas most tax protesters of this school these days start from the assumption that this amendment is already invalid or that (when properly parsed) it doesn’t actually authorize the federal income tax, and say that they are resisting not to make this so, but because it is already so.

Bray goes on to describe some of the methods used by these tax protesters to avoid paying federal income tax. They sound pretty sketchy to me, and I’d be surprised if any of them amounted to good advice, but maybe back then some of them worked to some extent:

• “The favorite one, reportedly used by some 3% million Americans at the present time, is the religious exemption whereby any religious leader, self-ordained or otherwise, may exempt himself and his household from Federal and State income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes.”
• “the ‘Equity Pure Trust,’ is available to the taxpayer who is willing to keep detailed records. It seems that this unique type of trust exempts one’s estate from the ravages of inheritance, estate, and gift taxes and partially exempts it from the other big four taxes: income, social security, property, and sales. It is quite complicated, however, and its most loyal subscribers are those termed ‘the rich and the superrich.’ ”
• “The fifth amendment approach is quite straight-forward: the ex-taxpayer merely places the fifth amendment objection to self-incrimination in each blank space in the 1040 return where his answer to the question may tend to incriminate him.”
• “anyone who has not made the requisite $750 income in gold and silver during a taxable year is not required to file a return. Since U.S. Federal Reserve Notes have not been redeemable in gold or silver since March 18, 1968, no one has gotten ‘income’-no real income, no taxable income.”

Bray plugs the Libertarian Party’s ballot-box approach to tax protest as well:

Libertarians identify taxation as theft and hold that it therefore ought to be outlawed. Their platform calls for legal challenges to the tax system, and their ranks are growing, in part, as a result of this stand.

The libertarians’ view of taxation stems from their conclusion that the individual is the primary agent of economic transactions and ought to be free to spend what he earns as he prefers. Having thus precluded forced financing of government activities, they advocate a totally voluntary society in which the proper function of government would be only the protection of the life, liberty, and property of each from fraud and coercion, Each person would be free to purchase as much protection as he or she believes needed, Government services would have to compete in the marketplace for the consumer dollar, and government activity would occupy only that share of the market which reflected the choices of the consumers. And that would be the end of compulsory government financing.

If this was an accurate description of the original Libertarian Party of Karl Bray it sure isn’t an accurate description of today’s considerably more government-accommodating Libertarian Party (of, say, Bob Barr).

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 this coming Tax Day? 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.
• When I was in Colombia two years ago I learned a bundle about the struggles of conscientious objectors to military service there. I was happy to hear recently that the Constitutional Court there has made a decisive ruling meant to protect the rights of conscientious objectors. The Colombian military is almost an independent branch of government in Colombia, and hasn’t shown much respect for the law in the past, and so it may drag its heels over submitting to the court’s ruling. But activists there are hailing this as an important step, and it was certainly the product of a lot of hard and patient work on their part.
• Scott London, Sheriff of Eddy County, New Mexico, intervened to stop the IRS and federal marshals from seizing property of county resident Kent Carter. Carter has refused to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars the IRS says he owes; Carter, apparently under the influence of the “show me the law” school of tax protesters, denies he owes anything.
• I’ve never been a fan of Al Sharpton, but I may have to change my mind. According to a report at National Review Online, “Every Sharpton business known has been dissolved for failure to comply with tax rules” and Sharpton “also personally owes New York State nearly $596,000, according to active tax warrants.”
• Sure enough, last year a record number of Americans renounced their citizenship or dropped their residency status.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Erica Weiland talks tax resistance with Shane Claiborne on the War Tax Talk podcast:
• The New York Times covers the ongoing war against water rates in Ireland.

  About a third of the country’s households have simply refused to register with the newly created state authority that is to run the country’s water service, though the deadline for doing so has now been extended three times. In some neighborhoods, workers trying to install meters have been met with angry mobs and forced to flee.

• Peter Reilly, at his Forbes blog, writes about the distinction between tax evaders, tax protesters, and tax resisters.
• The Krebs on Security blog goes behind the scenes to the discussion forums where scammers pulling off identity theft heists against the IRS share their tips and adjust their strategies to get around the agency’s countermeasures.

Remember Ghis, formerly known as Ghislaine Lanctôt, that idiosyncratic, “personocratic” tax resister from Canada? (I reviewed her book Escape in Prison back in 2010).

The book told the story of her two-month imprisonment on charges related to her tax refusal in Canada, and of the process that led her to take her stand. At the time of its publication, her case had still not been resolved (she was released from prison when the Judge decided that the charges she was facing would not warrant a longer imprisonment than she’d already served for refusal to cooperate with the court).

I’ve recently received an update from Ghis that includes the story of what happened next.

Ghis believes in a weird sort of mythology in which we people, with our names, are assigned fictional doppelgangers at birth by a world conspiracy of governments. These doppelgangers share our names, but in all capital letters, and have debts attached to them which our lower-case selves spend the rest of our days working off through taxpaying.

So, when Ghis returned to court, where the trial of GHISLAINE LANCTÔT was taking place, she reiterated her belief that the trial was not about her, but about her doppelganger. The judge was having none of it, so Ghis turned around and walked out. She (or SHE, anyway) was sentenced in absentia to a thousand-dollar fine, which she has no intention of paying. This was back in 2009.

The upshot is that after not paying taxes for 15 years, Ghis has served a couple of months in prison, but hasn’t paid a cent. She’s pretty satisfied with that result.

Some international tax resistance notes

• An article on modern-day Christian martyrs in Crux includes this passage:

  In Honduras, Maria Francisca Sevilla, 39, was a mother of three who co-pastored the “Church of God for Life Ministry” in the city of Choloma alongside her husband. In April 2014, she was stabbed to death by two young gang members, reportedly after she had refused to pay what the gangs call a “war tax” to ensure her church’s safety.

  One year before, Sevilla and her husband claimed they had been abducted and beaten by gang members in an effort to extort “war tax” payments, a practice observers describe as increasingly common.

  “This dedicated couple, who ministered in their church for 10 years, could have moved away for safety, but they felt called to the city and remained even though they were in danger,” said Tim Hill, director of Church of God World Missions, after Sevilla’s murder.

• Business owners in Eastleigh, Kenya have decided to stop paying taxes to Nairobi County in protest against the government’s failure to provide basic services. Eastleigh North Ward representative Osman Adow Ibrahim, a member of the County Assembly, wrote: “As your representative, I fully support the decision you have made and have engaged a lawyer to get an injunction through the courts. The law and Constitution of Kenya allows for peaceful protest to get one’s rights. I hope we all stand together on this, so that we get the service we need.”
• Greek tax resisters have discovered that they can keep the tax collector at bay, at least for a while, by paying only a single euro of their taxes.
• A curious looking Indiegogo crowdfunding project called world citizen solutions has raised (last I checked) about half of its $79,000 goal towards developing a vaguely-described war tax resistance strategy. It is so vaguely described that it’s surprising to me that people are willing to chip in to support it, so maybe I’m missing some context. It has the odor of a sovereign-citizen or maybe a seasteading/micronation plan of some sort. Some excerpts:

  [T]he world citizen solution [is] a no compromise yet peaceful and lawful way to extract ourselves from tax obligations that literally make us accomplices to perpetual war. Or in other words, financiers of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

  [We] are currently developing a legal and social strategic initiative that will have profound effects on releasing humanity from its current paradigm.

  That all sounds pretty woo-woo to me, but it seems to have lit a fire under some folks anyway.

There’s a new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with content including:

• NWTRCC co­ordin­ator Lin­coln Rice gives a run-down of some of the “Tax Day” actions taking place this year.
• Anne Barron relates war tax re­sist­ance to Cop­Watch activism.
• Some notes about the new Qual­i­fied Busi­ness In­come de­duc­tion, the IRS budget request, tax evasion of “gig economy” workers, the ongoing fake-IRS phone scam, and the difficulty of resisting tariffs.
• Some ideas and resources to help you with your outreach.
• Announcements on the death of Joffre Stewart, a memorial service for Tom Wilson, the upcoming NWTRCC national gathering in D.C., and stats about NWTRCC’s social media presence.
• A profile of war tax resister redmoonsong.

In other news…

• A new initiative launched with a splash in Catalonia under the name Ni 1 euro x a la repressió (“Not one euro for repression”). Modeled on the Spanish war tax resistance movement, it is urging people to redirect the taxes that would otherwise go to pay for the Spanish monarchy, the judiciary and state prosecutor, and the internal security services. The aim is to stop financial support for the Spanish suppression of Catalan independence. The website is splashy, and its interactive how-to-resist page in particular seems worth emulating by other similar resistance campaigns.
• Ashley Powers of the New York Times took a long look at the still-thriving “sovereign citizen” movement, and how sovereign citizens leverage their strange mythology to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars from the IRS by filing “frivolous” returns faster than the agency can keep up with them.
• The epidemic of destruction of automated traffic ticket machines along the roadways of France continues. According to the latest figures, government revenue from these cameras has dropped dramatically. The government believes it has lost €660 million in expected ticket revenue so far, and that’s in addition to the costs to repair or replace the damaged machines.

Some links from here and there:

• There’s a new National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee newsletter out, with content that includes:
  • Joining an “Extinction Rebellion” protest — Ruth Benn says that while XR is “a little too focused on its own brand” there may be some common ground to be found with the climate emergency protesters and the war tax resistance movement.
  • Mennonite Church creates a “Peace Tax Fund” — a report back from the Mennonite Church USA national gathering, where a war tax redirection fund was relaunched.
  • Joseph Olejak reflects on what he did when his war tax resistance led the government to revoke his professional license.
  • Suzanne Belote Shanley and Brayton Shanley of the Agape Community interviewed.
• American anti-abortion tax resister Michael E. Bowman is back in the news. Among the latest details are that Bowman was first targeted by the IRS because of his involvement in a tax protest scheme cooked up by Joseph Saladino. He is trying a Religious Freedom Restoration Act defense (which is also a long-shot contemplated by some U.S. war tax resisters), and is also putting forward the theory that because he got away with not filing returns for eighteen years, he therefore had a reasonable belief that what he was doing was lawful. Bowman has had some success in court in the past, with a judge ruling that his actions of cashing his paychecks rather than depositing them (so as to avoid IRS levies) did not constitute criminal evasion.
• The IRS seems to be getting more aggressive about trying to get passports revoked from people who have large tax debts. Under the law, if a taxpayer owes more than $52,000 and isn’t doing anything about it, the agency is supposed to inform the State Department. The State Department is then required to not issue or renew a passport to the scofflaw, and may also revoke their existing passport. The IRS is trying to convince State to put that “may” to use. The agency says it plans to send out Letter 6152 (“Notice of Intent to Request U.S. Department of State Revoke Your Passport”) to some tax delinquents, after which it will lobby the State Department to take stronger action (of this advice State can still, as far as I can tell, take it or leave it).
• Attacks on traffic ticket radar robots continue, with French resisters disabling them as quickly as the government can prop them back up. Attacks have also taken place in recent weeks in Germany, England, and Spain.

Some tabs that have crossed my browser in recent days:

• Pete Brace, an environmental activist from the U.K., stopped filing his tax return in 2014, relying on a law that makes it a crime to encourage or assist the commission of various crimes (such as crimes facilitated by taxpaying, thanks to government negligence about climate change). Brace shares his correspondence with Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs at his website. This may be helpful to other resisters trying to navigate that government’s tax collection bureaucracy, and perhaps also a source of inspiration to climate change activists curious about adding tax resistance to their set of tactics.
• Some more details are emerging about the tax strike launched in Lebanon. The activists have been testing the waters for some time now to see how much support they can expect, but now seem to be putting a broad tax strike into effect including municipal taxes, income taxes, value-added taxes, government-run utility bills, and traffic tickets. Businesses are being encouraged to pay wages in cash to facilitate resistance by their employees.
• The IRS has declared that it plans to step up its face-to-face visits with “taxpayers with ongoing tax issues”.

  The IRS routinely conducts these face-to-face visits. The primary factors of these visits are to make contact with taxpayers who have a previously known tax issue that wasn’t resolved through mail contact. The first face-to-face contact from a revenue officer is almost always unannounced.

  The article notes that the IRS will announce that it plans to conduct such visits in a particular area ahead of time (how this announcement will be made is left vague).
• I noted a news mention of some “sovereign citizen”-style tax resisters from Florida. One thing that caught my eye was their insistence that they’re “aboriginal indigenous Moorish Americans” which I remember from the bizarre mythology of the Nuwaubian cult which I’d investigated years ago. But I was also intrigued by the outline of their interesting fraud, which involved claiming to the IRS that they’d won the lottery but (apparently) had had too much money withheld for taxes, and so were due a refund. “The IRS paid them $3.4 million before the agency realized the pair had never purchased a winning ticket, prosecutors say.” Flush with success, they pushed their luck, claiming to win the lottery year after year after year, and not giving up even after the IRS raided the home of one of the schemers.
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues, with the robot hordes taking casualties in France, Guadeloupe, Italy, and Australia in recent weeks.
• The Greek government is considering extreme measures to crack down on a culture of tax evasion. The Prime Minister has proposed legislation that would require people to use traceable, electronic payment systems rather than cash for many transactions. One way they would enforce this would be that if a Greek citizen did not spend at least 30% of their income via these traceable means, they would be subject to an additional 22% tax on the untraced portion.