How you can resist funding the government → about the IRS and U.S. tax law/policy → how is tax law/policy/administration changing? → ratting out neighbors & employers

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that the IRS has outsourced some of its delinquent tax collection activities to quasi-private debt collection agencies.

More insidiously, and more sneakily, they’ve also outsourced some of their auditing and investigation. They’ve done this by expanding their policy of encouraging snitches (they call them “whistleblowers”) to rat people out by kicking back a percentage of what they’re able to recover.

To take advantage of this, a bunch of lawyers have decided to go into the freelance tax investigation business. Here’s an excerpt from a recent press release:

Today, The Ferraro Law Firm filed a new record tax whistleblower submission of more than $4.4 billion to the IRS Whistleblower Office. The Ferraro Law Firm has now brought to the U.S. government’s attention dozens of taxpayers who have collectively underpaid their taxes by more than $10 billion. The previous known record submission of $2 billion was also filed by the firm on December 11, 2007. The IRS established the Whistleblower Office in 2007 to collect information about tax cheats and must, by law, pay a reward of up to 30 percent of the amount collected to the tax whistleblower.

Who will be the first to denounce me to the feds for a buck?

In other news:

• In 2006, Congress decided to try to encourage people to inform on their employers and anyone else they knew of who was engaging in tax evasion — by offering informers a percentage of the take. How is that working out? “In the past five years, the IRS has given only one known whistleblower reward under the program.” This isn’t because nobody is trying to collect the rewards, but because the IRS is being stingy about paying them out.
• One sign that the Greek adoption of tax resistance is widespread is this one: when the government hiked the costs of transit tickets by 40%, revenues only went up by 6%.
• Here’s another note about the household tax resistance movement in Ireland.

A bunch happened while I was away and I’m only just getting caught up. Here’s the highlight reel:

• The IRS has been pursuing war tax resister Cindy Sheehan for months, and not long ago they hauled her into court to try to get a judge to order her to cough up financial information they could use against her. She fought back, with help from NWTRCC and its legal advisor. The IRS has apparently thrown in the towel! Sheehan posted to her blog a letter she got from the agency in which it informs her that they have withdrawn their summons.
• There’s a new issue of NWTRCC’s newsletter on-line, with content including:
  • Ruth Benn and Ed Hedemann comment on the popular War Resisters League federal budget pie chart, why its numbers differ from those of some other groups, and some of the judgment calls that go into its calculations.
  • A first look at the responses to NWTRCC’s questionnaire surveying people in the war tax resistance movement.
  • Some notes on the taxable income baseline, how to adjust your withholding as a new employee, and the latest news on the telephone excise tax resistance front.
  • A brief article on War Resisters International’s flamboyant tax capitulation last month. (See also the coverage of this in SchNEWS and The Friend.)
  • A review of war tax resister Peg Morton’s new book Feeling Light Within, I Walk.
  • Announcing the upcoming Spring 2013 NWTRCC national gathering in Asheville, North Carolina.
  • A profile of war tax resister Andrea Ayvazian.



• A coalition of groups have organized a “Pull the Pork (from the Pentagon)” national day of action to try to point out that the sacred cow of Pentagon spending is really a pricey pig in a poke.
• Levante profiles ecological and antimilitarist activist Francesc García Barberà, who was involved in the Spanish struggle for the recognition of conscientious objection to military service, and in its war tax resistance movement. Excerpts (my translation):

  As a conscientious objector, García Barberà performed alternative service in the Barrio del Cristo, where he became involved in the Workers’ Catholic Action Brotherhood, to which he remains linked, as with the objector movement. “The objection is in all of life; it’s not only not doing military service, but it’s rethinking the role of the Army and of military spending. The movement did not end when objection was legalized nor when conscription was abolished,” he notes.

  Today he is associated with pacifist groups, never fails each year to make a symbolic assault on the NATO base in Bétera, and practices tax resistance, like a handful of Alaquàsers of his generation. “We omit the percentage that we estimate is dedicated to military spending (between 7% and 12%) and redirect it to Caritas or some NGO,” he explains, which on some occasions has meant conflict with the Treasury Department. “Armies defend borders when what ought to be defended is a dignified life for people. And even if they are dressed up as humanitarian actions, they serve large vested interests. In a war the strongest wins, not the most just,” he says.

• Amy Wachspress reminisces about her years as a war tax resister in the early 1980s on her blog.
• Armies of citizen informers… a behind-the-Iron-Curtain Orwellian nightmare, or the latest IRS business plan? IRS payments to what it calls “whistleblowers” who inform the agency on tax evaders jumped from $8 million in 2011 to $125.4 million in 2012. A single $100-million payoff to an informer inside the Swiss bank UBS helped boost the total this year.