How you can resist funding the government → about the IRS and U.S. tax law/policy → IRS incompetence → enforcement effort/results → Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reports on

TIGTA notes that while the IRS has been increasing its enforcement activity (audits, and so forth) in recent years, this isn’t so impressive when seen on a somewhat larger timescale:

Many compliance activities increased and results improved during Fiscal Year 2006. Since FY 2000, the IRS has been reversing many of the downward trends in compliance activities that had occurred in prior years.… The use of collection enforcement tools was greater and enforcement revenue collected continued to increase (to $48.7 billion), but the total dollar amount of uncollected liabilities increased to $271 billion.…

The overall percentage of tax returns examined increased by just over 4%, and the number of field examiners increased by just over 9%. However, the percentage of tax returns examined is still 27% lower than it was in FY 1997. The number of tax returns of individuals examined increased. However, 82% were conducted via correspondence examinations, which are usually not as comprehensive as face‑to‑face examinations. The number of corporate tax returns examined decreased 1%, after increasing 71% in FY 2005. However, the number of these examinations has decreased 59% since FY 1997.

TIGTA has released a new report on IRS criminal enforcement activities in FY 2006.

In summary:

In FY 2006, although the percentage of tax-related subject investigations initiated and the percentage of direct investigative time applied to tax-related subject investigations increased, several key performance measures showed decreases from FY 2005. For example, the number of subject investigations initiated decreased 8.5 percent, the number of subject investigations in open inventory decreased 5.8 percent, the number of subject investigations referred for prosecution decreased 4.9 percent, the number of subjects convicted of a crime decreased 6.1 percent, and the number of subjects sentenced for a crime decreased 3.6 percent.

One of the details that stood out to me was this:

Research suggests that higher levels of criminal sentences lead to higher tax compliance.… ¶ In an effort to ensure voluntary compliance, the function changed its philosophy to allow for more publicity of its tax investigations. It continues to increase the publicity on tax prosecutions, and the overall publicity rate of 75.6 percent for prosecutions in FY 2006 was an all time high. The 81.3 percent publicity rate for legal source [those crimes involving legal industries and occupations and legally earned income] income tax investigations is also an all time high. This increased exposure indicates the function is receiving media attention and sending the message to taxpayers that violations of the Internal Revenue Code and related financial crimes are being investigated and prosecuted.

This suggests to me that those tax resisters who are courting or anticipating criminal prosecution would be well-advised to prepare some sort of media strategy ahead of time, knowing that the IRS will certainly be trying to put a loud and attention-grabbing spin on every prosecution. Conscientious tax resisters can get a “free ride” on the IRS’s own publicity department if they plan ahead and use some savvy.

Last month, I took a look at the IRS enforcement numbers over the last several years. TIGTA has now released its own analysis.

They note increased levies, liens, and seizures during the past several years, leading to an increase in the total revenue collected. But they also say that “the total dollar amount of uncollected liabilities increased to the 10‑year high of $290 billion. In addition, the gap between new delinquent account receipts and closures had widened by almost 63 percent by the end of FY 2007.

[T]he number of taxpayers (866,777) and the amount owed ($34.9 billion) on accounts in the Queue were each at a 10‑year high. One reason for the increase in the Queue this year is a rise in the number of compliance assessments. While the Queue is a source of work for Collection function employees, a significant number of accounts in the Queue might never be worked. In addition, in FYs 2001 through 2007, the IRS removed almost 7.6 million accounts with balance-due amounts totaling almost $31.2 billion from Collection function inventory. These accounts might never be worked.

Here are their numbers (which are mostly the same as the numbers I found, except that they go back a couple of years more):

Another choice quote:

More TDAs were received than closed, and the gap between TDA receipts and TDA closures had widened by almost 63 percent (to 1,914,508 accounts) as of the end of the fiscal year. This is the largest year-end gap in the 10‑year period. … The Collection function is unable to work all of the existing accounts in the Queue with current staffing, and the number of TDA receipts is outpacing closures.

Today, some bits-and-pieces that have collected over the past weeks that I haven’t been able to fit in anywhere else:

• A site calling itself The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree brings the war tax resister “penny poll” into the digital age: asking people to fill a shopping cart with things they’d rather have bought than the Iraq War for that $3,000,000,000,000.
• Steev Hise reports back from the NWTRCC conference in Birmingham, Alabama.
• The Tax Prof Blog notes a study on cigarette smuggling in the wake of sharp rises in tobacco taxes in some states. The Tax Foundation says this has often been accompanied by a rise in smuggling-related crime.
• A TIGTA audit shows that in conflicts with the IRS, low-income taxpayers get poor service from the Taxpayer Advocate Service. Another TIGTA report looked at the challenges facing the government in its attempts to close the “Tax Gap.”
• The IRS got caught playing a sneaky trick in Tax Court — a “fraud on the court” in the words of one judge, who applied sanctions to the agency in 1,300 cases it was prosecuting, leading to over $30 million in refunds.
• The Tax Foundation notes that while we’re distracted complaining about the windfall profits of ExxonMobil and the like, the real bandits are getting off skot free: “the total amount of taxes the company paid or remitted [last quarter was] $29.3 billion, nearly three times the net profits it earned for shareholders. The financial statements of two other large U.S.-based oil companies, ConocoPhillips and ChevronTexaco, show similar large tax payments. Indeed, these three companies paid or remitted a combined $47.8 billion in taxes in the first quarter of 2008, nearly $28 billion more than they earned in net profits.”
• Mimi Copp says that the Iraq War has cost American families about $16,500 each. But she’s decided to stop payment. “It is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. But this year, with a core group of people in my church community, Circle of Hope, I was able to walk with them through the discernment process and I felt quite strongly about doing this form of resistance to war-making, while at the same time redirecting money to life-giving initiatives. Here’s a letter to the editor I wrote for tax day, which was not published.”:

  How can we stop the war in Iraq? Soldiers can refuse to fight. Government leaders can de-fund the occupation. Taxpayers can stop paying for it.

  This year I will not pay my federal income tax to the U.S. government. I will no longer support my country’s war-making by giving it my money.

  In FY 2006, out of every dollar the U.S. government spent, 5 cents was spent on education and 12 cents on food and housing assistance, while it spent 41 cents on war & preparations for war. This type of spending does not reflect my Christian values and therefore I will not support it.

  Instead, I will redirect my tax dollars to two organizations working on life-giving initiatives: healthcare for the uninsured and aid for Iraqi refugees.

  When Congress passes the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill (HR-1921), I will resume paying my income tax to the U.S. government.

  I know that I will be breaking the law and I am prepared to accept the consequences, because when a country wages war there are consequences; ask a solider returning home or an Iraqi refugee being resettled in Philadelphia.

• The MakingPeace blog reports on another variation of the “penny poll”-style war tax protest. It’s pretty simple: just pieces of paper on which are printed “I’d rather buy _______ than war!”, accompanied with magic markers aplenty.
• Everybody in the willfully ineffective wing of the American anti-war movement is going to Cleveland next month for an Open National Conference to Stop the War in Iraq and Bring the Troops Home Now. They seem to have concluded, before the conference even begins, that the most important thing they can be doing right now is to organize another big march and rally like the ones that have been so effective in the past.
• The Urban Institute has published a paper on War and Taxes to note that the Iraq War seems to be an anomaly in that the U.S. government is spending hand over fist on the war, but not trying to raise revenue accordingly.

A recent TIGTA report had a useful appendix: Synopsis of Selected Legal Provisions for Conducting Seizures.

It is a rundown of the laws that regulate how the IRS can seize property to satisfy tax liabilities.

Some links that have caught my eye recently:

• The Green Zone: How a Greening Culture Cannot Ignore the Military. The elephant in the room during the debate over the environment and climate change and what-have-you is U.S. militarism. If “the largest source of pollution in the world is the military, particularly the military at war” then maybe environmentalists have something better to do than encourage people to change their lightbulbs.
• Tax resistance by American fiscal conservatives against taxpayer-funded bailouts and deficit spending continues to be an idea that has yet to come, though a lot of folks are meekly hoping somebody else will get the ball rolling. The latest of these ideas goes by the name “Operation Dep 9” and encourages folks to re-file their W-4 forms, claiming 9 allowances so as to reduce or eliminate federal income tax withholding (this is the same technique that many war tax resisters use).
• The proprietor of FSK’s Guide to Reality has written up some back-of-the-envelope theorizing about “tax resister insurance.” For those of you not patient enough to wait for such theories to incorporate on earth, I encourage you to look in to the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund, which, despite its possible theoretical shortcomings, is actually in operation.
• I haven’t had a chance to look at this closely, but it sounds interesting: Protecting Trust Assets from the Federal Tax Lien.
• Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society writes about Barter Networks and the Counter-Economy.
• The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration says that IRS agents are “not using collection tools, including tax liens, levies and property seizures, soon enough in many instances” and recommends that they clamp down sooner and more ruthlessly.
• Protesters in China “overturned police cars and blocked roads over plans to more strictly enforce payment of taxes”:

  China’s official Xinhua news agency said the local government’s plan to more strictly enforce payment of taxes from the furniture makers and dealers has been suspended in the face of the opposition. China’s furniture industry has suffered in the global economic downturn from a decline in demand from export markets. Thousands of similar protests over taxes, land disputes or corruption are reported in China each year.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Laura K. is among those few Americans who said “to hell with it; I’m moving to Canada” and really meant it. She lets us know how war tax resistance looks in the Maple Leaf State.
• The Seattle Times reports on the case of a single mom who made less than $19,000 at her job at Supercuts. The IRS audited her because it said nobody could live in Seattle on that little money. And then they went after her family.
• Mennonite Weekly Review memorializes peace tax fund advocate Marian Franz.
• The Baltimore City Paper reports on “hacks” — a sort of unregulated, underground economy taxi service.
• The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration concluded that for tax years 2006 and 2007, more than half a billion dollars in erroneous education tax credits were claimed by 372,000 taxpayers.
• Carolyn Chute’s Second Maine Militia — that quirky amalgam of leftists, rightists, and back-and-forth-ists that Bill Kauffman mentioned in Look Homeward, America, is still shooting televisions, says Time magazine.

A few more things of interest that passed through my RSS aggregator and email inbox while I was away:

• George Monk and Molly Schaffnit went off-the-grid and back-to-the-land, motivated in part by their desire to live under the tax line on a lower income to avoid contributing to the U.S. military. The Charleston Daily Mail tells their story. Also: they have a web site.
• Patrick O’Neill comments on the sentencing of war tax resister Frank Donnelly.
• Murray Rothbard examines the 17^th century French tax rebellion of the Croquants.
• The IRS is getting meaner, but that doesn’t mean they’re getting any more money. The Taxpayer Advocate noted: “Since FY 1999, the IRS has increased lien filings by about 475 percent and levies by about 600 percent, yet inflation-adjusted revenue raised by the IRS Collection function has actually declined by about seven percent over that period.” Another recent report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration tells a similar story: in 2009 the IRS brought in less money from collections, and left more delinquent accounts stranded, while at the same time ramping up its use of collection enforcement tools.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration issued a report back in August that finally went public a few days back, the gist of which is that the IRS is writing off many tax debts as “uncollectible” without really trying all that hard to collect them first.

The report says that in 2012, the IRS gave up on 482,611 outstanding tax debts (representing about $6.7 billion dollars) as uncollectible because the taxpayer could not be found or could not be contacted. The Inspector General analyzed a sample of these cases and found that in more than half of them, “there was no evidence that [IRS] employees completed all of the required research steps” before giving up.

The report gives some insight into what sorts of investigative tools the IRS uses (or is supposed to use) to track down hard-to-find taxpayers. These are (using terminology as used in the report):

• telephone directories
• IRS’s Information Returns Processing data [basically, the agency’s record of the past nine years of tax returns]
• send a postal tracer
• motor vehicle records
• employment commissions
• courthouse records for real and personal property
• local licensing when the taxpayer owns a business
• online resources (Accurint) [which “includes motor vehicle records, courthouse records, and licensing information”]
• Integrated Data Retrieval System tax return research, if the due date of the last filed return was within the past two years
• Currency and Banking Retrieval System research when Integrated Data Retrieval System research reflects that a taxpayer has filed a Foreign Bank Account Reporting form, and possible use of a Tax Attache for International accounts

Other items mentioned in the Internal Revenue Manual include:

• “Local management may require that additional information sources be checked, for example U.S. Coast Guard and local licensing agencies where boat ownership is common.”
• “A field call to the taxpayer’s last known address”
• “…check utility companies, to see who is paying the bills at the taxpayer’s address and how the bills are paid, for a possible levy source”
• “secure and analyze a full credit report”
• “Request a passport check when the taxpayer travels outside the United States frequently or there is reason to believe the taxpayer travels outside the United States frequently… [and] Consider requesting that a taxpayer be placed on the Department of Homeland Security lookout list if you have been unable to locate or contact the taxpayer and if they live outside the U.S. or travel outside the U.S.”

Both of these sources, alas, redact the dollar amounts that mark thresholds at which the IRS either turns up the heat or throws in the towel.

Ready for some more schadenfreude about the woes of the IRS?

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration recently released a report on how Declining Resources Have Contributed to Unfavorable [sic] Trends in Several Key Automated Collection System Business Results.

The IRS has three tiers of response to people like me who don’t pay their taxes. The first and least resource-intensive is called the “Notice Stream” — a series of computer-generated letters. The second tier — “Automated Collection System” — involves actual agency employees, who answer incoming calls from delinquent taxpayers and go hunting for assets to levy. A third tier — “Collection Field function” — is a more assertive version of this, and may initiate contact with delinquent taxpayers, visit them, or even in rare cases seize property.

This report has to do with the decay of the second tier under the pressure of budget cuts and the need to shift personnel to cover new challenges. Some highlights:

Since Fiscal Year 2010, 39 percent of the ACS workforce has been lost due to attrition or reassignment.

The inability to hire behind attrition losses over the last three years has caused the ACS to lose 684 (24 percent) of the 2,824 contact representatives who were working in FY 2010. In addition to ACS employee attrition, three ACS call sites were taken offline in February 2013 to work AM function inventory. IRS management made this decision to free up AM function resources to address the IRS’s growing inventory of identity theft cases. The initiative was originally scheduled to continue for three months, but was subsequently extended and was ongoing at the conclusion of our field work. This reallocation was the equivalent of losing an additional 410 contact representatives because the employees in these three ACS call sites were answering taxpayer questions rather than working ACS inventory. As a result of this, combined with ACS employee attrition, the number of ACS contact representatives in FY 2013 was 39 percent less than in FY 2010.

The IRS made a decision to prioritize being able to answer calls from delinquent taxpayers, believing that such a taxpayer who calls in is the easiest sort to squeeze. But in order to be able to handle the same volume of incoming calls with fewer employees, they had to deprioritize working on the rest of the cases in their inventory.

In FY 2010, 35% of ACS employee hours were devoted to the inventory; this shrank to 24% in FY 2013 — a decrease of “43 percent, from 695,860 to 396,386 [hours].” As a result, the inventory increased from 5.94 million accounts to 7.79 million accounts (a 31% increase), while the average age of the accounts in inventory has increased from 46 to 62 weeks (a 35% increase).

[W]e reviewed ACS business results for FYs 2010 through 2013 and determined that:

• New inventory [of delinquent tax cases] is outpacing case closures, so the inventory is growing.
• Inventory is taking longer to close, so the cases in inventory are aging.
• Revenue declined and more cases were closed as Currently Not Collectible (CNC)
• Fewer enforcement actions (liens and levies) were taken.
• More, and older, cases were transferred to the Queue [where cases sit between the time when ACS gives up on them and when Collection Field function begins work on them], which further reduces the probability of collection by the CFf.

In 2010, the ACS collected $3.22 billion and wrote off $3.65 billion as “currently not collectible.” The equivalent numbers for 2013 were $2.82 billion and $4.03 billion. Levies and liens have also dropped during this span, from 2.94 million and 0.55 million respectively to 1.22 million and 0.22 million.

These drops are in part a direct effect of the agency having fewer employees to initiate collection actions, but also an indirect effect of the agency wanting to meet its “Level of Service” goals — that is, how many incoming phone calls it is able to answer successfully. Because enforcement actions often lead to calls from upset taxpayers, the agency has been engaging in fewer such actions merely as a way to cut down on call volume!

ACS management advised us that they take certain steps to control and manage the volume of incoming calls in an effort to assist the ACS in achieving its Level of Service goal. In addition, the Joint Operations Center advised us that under the direction of IRS Headquarters, the ACS decreased the number of enforcement actions taken to proactively reduce the volume of incoming calls.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The IRS is envisioning hiring freezes and furloughs this year, but also seems to be showing a strange lack of care when it does hire people — particularly as tax-season temporary help. According to a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration audit, the agency rehired hundreds of former employees who had significant “substantiated conduct or performance issues” during a previous stint with the agency, including “unauthorized access to taxpayer information, leave abuse, falsification of official forms, unacceptable performance, misuse of IRS property, and off-duty misconduct” — indeed five such new hires “had willfully failed to file their Federal tax returns.”
• Speaking of IRS woes. Here’s a link to a promotional video about the IRS’s new data processing computers… back when they were new. According to agency commissioner John Koskinen, they haven’t changed much since then. “We’re running applications that were running when John F. Kennedy was president. That’s how antiquated the system is.”
• The Nuclear Resister profiles war tax resister and activist Bonnie Urfer. “Bonnie’s conscientiously self-limited income keeps her from supporting the war system which now gets about half of everyone’s federal income taxes. Living under the taxable limit has always been part of her life of resisting militarism in thought, word and deed.”

Today, a roundup of links from here and there:

American War Tax Resisters

• Ruth Benn reports on war tax resister presence at the protests surrounding the United Nations review of the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty.
• Here are some photos from NWTRCC’s national gathering in Milwaukee earlier this month. Erica Weiland wrote up a recap of the gathering.
• On the radio program A Prairie Home Companion, host Garrison Keillor gave a nod to war tax resistance in the course of a segment telling the story of the history of the Mennonites and another comic dramatization of a whimsical tax resister. Check out the “Garrison Keillor talks about the history of Mennonites” and “Catchup” segments in the archives.

IRS Woes

• The Treasury Department’s inspector-general issued a report stating that over a recent ten-year period, 1580 IRS employees “were found to have willfully evaded taxes.” Most (75%) were not fired, and some later received promotions, raises, and bonuses.
• The number of people who renounced their U.S. citizenship is aiming toward another record high this year. The first quarter of the year saw 1,335 people tell Sam “you’re not my uncle” — a new record.

Tax Resistance Campaigns Around the World

• Spanish war tax resisters have produced a stylish video to promote their cause: No Pagamos (We Aren’t Paying):

• Police brutality, discrimination, and mistreatment towards Israel’s Ethopian Jewish minority has led to protests, clashes, and to Shlomo Molla, one of the few Ethiopian-Israelis to have been in the Israeli parliament, calling for tax resistance, refusal to serve in the army, and other forms of civil disobedience.
• Paul Nicolson, a retired Anglican vicar, took his local council government to court, saying the £125 in fees it had added to the council tax that he had refused to pay in protest were excessive. He won his case.
• Payroll tax arrears are up 19% over the last fiscal year in Hong Kong and some are blaming the conscientious tax resistance movement (良心抗稅運動) that was launched as part of the pro-democracy “umbrella movement” there.
• Forty villages in Guragon, India have decided not to pay a new “house tax” the (Haryana) state government is trying to impose on them.
• The Chamber of Commerce and Industry in the northern Indian state of Jammu announced a policy of “total non-cooperation” including tax resistance in order to pressure the state government to meet its demands.

And now, a bit of domestic tax resistance news:

• Long-time war tax resister Karen Marysdaughter explores the links between war tax resistance and environmental activism.
• While the IRS has been complaining that budget cuts and corresponding cuts to collection personnel will cause revenue from collections to fall, the latest stats aren’t showing much of a correlation.
• There’s a new semiannual Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report out. It’s a real page-turner, but if you don’t have the time, here are a couple of highlights:
  • The report counts 3,300 people who have been fooled by phony IRS agents who call them up to threaten them about a tax debt and get them to send money to the scammers. The scam has netted something like $16.8 million. These figures may be understating the problem, as some people who got fooled probably haven’t spoken up about it.
  • The IRS rehired 141 former employees who had had “prior substantiated conduct or performance issues” “including [such issues as] willfully failed to file their tax returns… unauthorized access to taxpayer information, leave abuse, falsification of official forms, unacceptable performance, misuse of IRS property, and off-duty misconduct.” And nearly 20 percent of these also had such issues filed against them after having been rehired. Most curious to me is that when the IRS had this pointed out to them, their response was to say that they see no reason to change their hiring practices.
• Erica Weiland reflects on the NWTRCC presence at the recent Social Forum in San Jose, California.
• I still think the whole IRS scandal involving the screening of Tea Party groups that were trying to game the nonprofit system to engage in electioneering was largely bullshit. But whether from arrogance or incompetence or from more conniving motives, the agency is sure acting like it’s covering up something. Bullshit or not, the agency is doing as much as its enemies to keep the scandal alive.
• Oh yeah, and the IRS penned $19 million in contracts with contractors who haven’t paid their taxes. That’s against the law… not the not-paying-taxes part, which you already knew, but the doing business with tax-scofflaw companies part. Not that anyone at the agency will get in trouble for it.

If the IRS is after you for back taxes and they haven’t been able to convince you to write them a check, the next thing they’ll do is to try to find easy-to-seize assets: bank accounts and things of that sort.

Social Security benefits are one easy-to-seize asset. After all, the government is writing the check in the first place.

There are two ways the government goes about seizing Social Security benefits: via the Federal Payment Levy Program (FPLP) and by Field Collection.

FPLP is more automated, but also more limited. Through this program, the IRS can seize no more than 15% of your Social Security benefits continuously until your back taxes are paid off. However, by policy, the agency will not levy your Social Security benefits by means of the FPLP if your estimated income is below 250% of the poverty line.

Field Collection is less-limited. If your case is turned over to Field Collection, the agent assigned to your case may seize however much they think is appropriate — as much as 100%. However, Field Collection is also less-automated: It requires a revenue officer to examine your case and your circumstances and make a judgment call.

The IRS’s budget has been reduced in recent years, which has affected the number of cases it can work. In an April 2015 press article, an IRS manager stated that, due to resource constraints, revenue officers are only assigned very high-dollar balance due accounts. While the IRS later clarified that its collection actions are not limited to high dollar accounts because it has a variety of collection tools available, it did not clarify that revenue officers continue to work a full range of balance due cases.

That quote comes from a new TIGTA report on Social Security levies. The Washington Post article it refers to quoted an IRS Field Collection supervisor as saying that only if a person’s back taxes exceeded $1 million would a revenue officer be assigned to the case. It also quoted the IRS’s non-denial denial of this. (In TIGTA’s own investigation of a random sample of 136 cases where Social Security benefits were levied by Field Collection, however, it found the median balance due to be $83,226, with a back taxes range from hundreds to millions of dollars.)

Anecdotal reports from within the American war tax resistance community suggest that Social Security levies are done inconsistently and haphazardly, and the TIGTA report bears that out, noting that different Field Collection group managers had very different policies, and different ideas of what the goals of Social Security benefits seizures were. Some indicated that they had set policies that, on further inspection, were not actually being carried out by the revenue officers in their groups.

Field Collection agents were sometimes assigned cases that were already being collected via FPLP, and in most of these cases, they canceled the FPLP and issued a manual levy for a higher amount. Sometimes they did this even though they had reason to believe that this would cause economic hardship. They also felt no reason to respect the 250%-of-poverty-line cut-off that the FPLP program uses.

Although Field Collection agents can decide they want to take as much as 100% of your Social Security benefits to pay back taxes, you have the right to a partial exemption, based on your age, filing status, number of dependents, and other sources of income, so that they leave you enough to live on. In practice, the audit found, the IRS was frequently failing to give people these exemptions they were entitled to, or to let them know they were entitled to them.

My take-away from this is that if you find that your Social Security benefits are being seized for back taxes, it may well be worth your while to research the laws and policies the IRS is supposed to be following in such cases and then to raise a fuss if they are screwing up. If you have a low income, mostly from Social Security, you can likely get most of it exempted from the levy, but the agent on your case may not know this or may be hoping you don’t figure it out.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

war tax resistance

• Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey recalls his time with Juanita & Wally Nelson, and his own ambivalent experiences with war tax resistance, in an article for the Boston Review.
• Here’s a recap of the recent National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee gathering earlier this month in Florida.
• I stumbled on this quote, shared recently by “tandy_jack” on Instagram, from the back of a Joan Baez album:

  We paid the taxes that bought the war that hired the men and dropped the fire that burned the huts and killed the people who then were the bodies that Scott counted. It’s a rotten thing to brainwash someone into doing the dirty part of the killing while we stay at home. It’s a rotten thing to pretend the war is coming to an end when it’s only taken to the air. And in 1972 if you don’t fight against a rotten thing you become part of it.

  What I’m asking you to do is take some risks. Stop paying war taxes, refuse the armed forces, organize against the air war, support the strikes and boycotts of farmers, workers, and poor people, analyze the flag salute, give up the nation state, share your money, refuse to hate, be willing to work… in short, sisters and brothers, arm up with love and come from the shadows.

virtual cash

• National governments are trying to discourage cash, so as to eliminate the sorts of anonymous, untraceable transactions that are difficult to tax. For example, the government of India recently made a surprise announcement that 500 and 1,000 rupee notes would no longer be legal tender after a certain deadline.
• Jeff Berwick, anarcho-capitalist entrepreneur, has encouraged Trump opponents to stop paying taxes and move into the Bitcoin economy.
• The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration says that the IRS has dropped the ball on developing guidelines for pursuing people who use virtual currencies to facilitate tax evasion.
• Yet, the IRS recently contacted a bitcoin trading company, demanding the identity of all of its bitcoin traders.

If the IRS does decide to crack down on virtual currencies, it may have to do so with virtual employees, as its real enforcement staff numbers have been dropping year after year:

This is from a new TIGTA report on IRS enforcement efforts.

This article, concerning another TIGTA report, gives a good indication of how strapped the agency is. Even when shown that there’s money on the table that just needs to be picked up (in this case, high-income people who haven’t filed income tax returns but whom the agency knows about), the IRS complains it doesn’t have enough people to do the picking.

Other links of interest:

• Another way the Greek government is trying to tax its tax-averse citizens to pay off international lenders is by adding a 20% tax on coffee imports. The Cafe Justicia/“Fair trade is not for sale” project plans to respond by smuggling fair trade coffee from Guatemala to Greece.
• Julie L. Holcomb, author of Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy was recently interviewed on the Ben Franklin’s World podcast.
• Ozy got Gloria Steinem to open up about her renewed interest in tax resistance. (Scroll down past the annoying video at the top.)
• Sometimes it’s the IRS that gets audited. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration looked at the IRS backlog of unpaid tax accounts and found hundreds in which penalties and interest had been incorrectly calculated by the agency.

More links of interest:

• A new TIGTA report says that the IRS frequently rehires employees it has previously fired for a variety of conduct or performance problems. For example:

  Auditors reviewed the records of 213 former employees brought back onboard in the Covington, Ky., office from July 2016 to March 2017 and found 96 had separated from the agency while being investigated. Of those, 19 had potential tax code violations, 4 had accessed taxpayer accounts without authorization, 13 had falsified forms, 2 had misused email or equipment, and 6 had been accused of misconduct such as absences without leave, workplace disruption or failure to follow instructions.

• Meanwhile, the GAO says that the IRS has failed to repair many computer security issues that it has previously identified. “[T]axpayer data will remain unnecessarily vulnerable to inappropriate and undetected use, modification, or disclosure,” the report says.
• Remember the myRA? No? Well, it wasn’t very memorable. It was a way to try to get more people to start up retirement accounts by making it cheaper and easier and less risky. President Obama launched the program in 2014. Here’s what I had to say about it then. In short, I wasn’t impressed. The accounts would ultimately be invested in government bonds, and so would constitute a loan to the government. It seems, though, that very few people were interested in participating in the program. It’s now been scrapped.
• The number of Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship is on a record-setting pace again this year.

Some links that have skipped past my browser in recent days:

• Shirin Ebadi, Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said of protesters in Iran: “People should stop paying electricity, water, and gas bills. They should not pay their tax. They should withdraw their money from banks.” The remarks were made a few days ago in a press interview.
• KQED commentator Luke Pease has lost interest in being a responsible taxpayer and now is on the lookout for businesses that offer a “discount for cash” and other opportunities to evade taxes levied by a government that has lost his moral support.
• The new federal tax law restricts how much people can take deductions on their federal tax returns for the state and local taxes they have paid. Some states and localities are toying with ways to allow taxpayers to recharacterize their taxes as charitable donations to get around the restrictions. On the other hand, the Tax Foundation is skeptical that such games will pass muster.
• Demonstrators in Urabá, Colombia, following in the footsteps of the Rebecca Rioters and the Bonnets Rouges, put two new highway tollbooths to the torch Friday.
• The vast majority of people whose bank accounts were abruptly seized by the IRS for “structuring currency transactions” (defined as deliberately depositing amounts under $10,000 in order not to have the transactions reported to the government) had earned that money legitimately, contrary to the government’s representations that such transactions were evidence of criminal activity, according to a new report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The law permits the IRS to seize money in such cases without having to go to the trouble of proving a crime, forcing the suddenly-impoverished owners to go to court to prove their innocence if they want to see their money again. The widespread abuse of this practice has led the agency to back off somewhat from the use of this tool.

Some recent links of note:

• NWTRCC kicked off this year’s federal tax filing season with a panel consisting of the experienced war tax resisters Kathy Kelly, Sam Yerger, Erica Leigh, Charlie Hurst, and Maria Smith, who explained their approaches to resistance and took questions from a live audience. You can view a video of the panel and the Q&A here.
• The IRS has officially delayed the start of the 2021 tax season, and is begging filers to file electronically rather than by using old-fashioned paper returns, since the agency still hasn’t processed 40% of the paper returns it received last year!
• Bars and restaurants in Cesena, Italy, who have been suffering through pandemic closures, launched a tax strike and publicized their protest by symbolically opening their establishments and having their staff wait on empty tables.
• You may remember that there were lots of empty threats to refuse to pay taxes to the Trump administration four years ago. Now it’s time for empty tax resistance threats from the Trumperists. Mel Magazine has collected several, and compares them with other examples of tax resistance and tax protest from American history. At American Greatness, Trumperist contributor Dan Gelernter advocates mass tax resistance against the Biden administration, but wants somebody else to lead it first and somehow make it safe and easy:

  [S]uppose… that the governor of a state like Texas or Florida were to say: Citizens of this state should not pay federal taxes this year, and our state will indemnify its citizens against federal prosecution. In other words, the state would assume the federal tax bill for its own citizens, and declare it null and void.

  Meanwhile, one of the more unhinged Trumperists decided it would be a good idea to publicly tweet an increasingly violent series of fantasies including threatening the life of a traffic cop, killing Nancy Pelosi, running over “a million people” in a speeding car, and… bombing the IRS headquarters. That last bit got him indicted on federal charges.
• TIGTA has released another report on the federal government’s use of private debt collection companies to pursue unpaid taxes. The report says that the companies recovered a mere 1.79% of the unpaid taxes they were assigned, and that more than a third of the money collected went to cover costs and profit for the private companies, with the remainder going to the Treasury.
• The National Taxpayer Advocate also released its report recently. It highlights some of the many problems the IRS had to cope with and/or exacerbate during the year of pandemic shutdowns and greater-than-usual government dysfunction. For example: Taxpayers got misleading tax notices that included deadlines to respond that had already passed by the time the notice was sent. People who tried to call the IRS were able to get through to an agency employee less than 25% of the time. Taxpayer records are processed on “the oldest major IT systems in the federal government,” but Congress has appropriated only about 8¼% of the estimated cost of updating them.
• Hey, what do you know? Another tax strike is brewing in South Kivu. This strike, which is scheduled to start in February, is meant to pressure the government to repair roads and bridges in the region.

Tax resistance links from hither and yon:

• Jacqui Germain penned an article on Economic Disobedience (What Is It and How Does It Work?) for Teen Vogue. It concludes with a few paragraphs on war tax resistance.
• The tax filing deadline came and went in the United States. Now that fewer people are filing last-minute paper returns, this is less of a spectacle than it once was, but war tax resisters still like to mark the occasion as a sort of ceremonial holiday. For example, in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley Taxes for Peace group redirected taxes from the government to useful groups. The People’s Life Fund in California also redirected $61,000 of would-be tax dollars to better causes.
• The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration issued yet another report. According to them, the IRS still had about four and a half million unprocessed paper tax returns to get through as of March 12^th, only a couple hundred thousand less than they started the year with, while meanwhile half a million new returns had come in and hadn’t been processed. The agency had a goal of hiring 5,473 new submission processing employees to cope with this, but as of March 15^th, they’d managed to onboard only 521.
• The IRS destroyed thirty million “information return” documents without processing them last year when the agency realized it would never catch up to the backlog in time to upgrade its systems for the next tax season. Information return documents are things like W-2s and 1099s that document sources of income. The agency relies on such returns to cross-check what taxpayers reveal on their income tax returns. The upshot of this is that for millions of taxpayers, if they did not reveal certain sources of income on their returns, the IRS is likely none the wiser about it. The decision has gotten scathing reviews, particularly from accountants who painstakingly generate and file these returns.
• In response to repeated massacres in Djugu, activists in Ituri have launched a 15-day hartal and a tax strike.
• The human struggle against the robot traffic ticket cameras continues, with the machines getting the worst of it in New Zealand, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium in recent weeks.