How you can resist funding the government →
a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns →
short-circuit the bureaucracy with paperwork →
file paper returns / extra paperwork
IRS estimates that a paper return costs $2.36 more to process than an electronically filed return.
And:
Paper returns also limit the effectiveness of IRS’s enforcement programs. To control costs, IRS does not transcribe all the lines on paper tax returns into its computer databases, such as taxpayers’ telephone numbers, limiting the amount of information available electronically for enforcement purposes.
As we previously reported, even small changes in the amount of information IRS transcribes can consume substantial resources that might offset some potential savings from electronic filing.
Further, to avoid disadvantaging taxpayers who file electronically, IRS has a policy of posting the same information from electronic and paper returns to its databases.
Consequently, if a line is not transcribed from paper returns, it is not posted from electronic returns either.
Only information posted to computer databases is readily available for use in IRS’s automated compliance checking programs. These programs include matching tax return entries with information returns from third parties, such as Form W-2s from employers or Form 1099s from financial institutions, and selecting suspicious returns for audit.
According to IRS officials, transcribing and posting more comprehensive information from individual income tax returns could facilitate the audit process, expedite contacts for faster resolution, reduce handling costs, allow for improved case selection, and potentially better define specific tax gap issues.
Although we have not independently verified IRS’s methodology, for one of its main enforcement programs — the Automated Underreporter Program — IRS officials estimate that having all tax return information available electronically would result in a $175 million increase in tax revenue annually, while at the same time, reduce its “no-change” rate, making it less likely that IRS would select taxpayers for further contact where no additional tax was assessed, thus lowering taxpayer burden.
So if you want to cause a little more expense and trouble for the IRS and you want to help make their tax enforcement less efficient, file paper tax returns rather than filing electronically.
This doesn’t mean you can’t do your tax return on a computer or with the help of a tax professional, but when you get to the end of that process and you’re ready to file, instead of “e-filing” ask for a printout and mail the printout in instead.
If you have your taxes done by a tax professional or at a volunteer tax assistance site, you might need to say explicitly that you want to file a paper return yourself rather than “e-filing” or the person helping you with your return may assume otherwise.
Want to throw the tax system into turmoil?
Go back to filing paper returns.
At least that’s the conclusion of George Jakabcin, IRS assistant deputy associate chief information officer for systems integration.
Tax Analysts reports:
If some event led half of the current e-filers to switch back to paper, “we would be in a world of hurt,” Jakabcin said.
“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 begin to argue that we are beginning to lose the expertise.”
There is, he said, “no going back.”
According to this article, “The cost [to the IRS] of processing a single paper-filed tax return is $2.87, compared to $0.35 for an e-filed return.”
Reliance on robotic warfare has escalated from the Bush to the Obama administrations, with very little significant public debate.
More than ever before, it is true that the U.S. doesn’t want our bodies to be part of warfare; there’s also not much interest in our consent.
All that is required is our money.
As I may have mentioned, a provision of the recently-enacted health care industry legislation — one that was little-noticed at the time but that has attracted some commentary since — requires businesses to file 1099s with the government for every other business from whom they purchase goods or services totalling at least $600. Some commentators have focused on the paperwork headache this involves, others on whether it is intending to lay the groundwork for a new value-added tax, but Gary North thinks it may be an opportunity for resistance-via-over-compliance:
The IRS will be buried in billions of new forms. I’m an older guy.
I think back to Carl Sagan’s memorable words in the PBS series, Cosmos: “billions and billions.”
These forms will have to be scanned into the system.
If businessmen want to protest this law in a legal but effective way, they will have their tax preparers write in the numbers by hand.
Then IRS will have to type in the data on each form by hand.
Billions and billions!
Business owners and managers will be outraged.
But what if word spreads?
“No electronic filing!”
What if the tax preparers fill in all the forms by hand.
It is legal.
It is not efficient, but it’s not all that much extra work.
Pay a few dollars more per filing.
At the other end, the IRS will get to process these forms by hand.
Think of what happens if businesses were to challenge every challenge by the IRS?
The business’s CPA simply asks in writing — I do mean writing (hand-written) — for the IRS to review the case.
Point out one mistake made by the IRS.
Automatically, every business should challenge every request for more tax money.
No exceptions.
Be polite.
Just ask the IRS to review its case in terms of this new information.
There are always gray areas.
Put them to use.
Pay a few bucks to your tax preparer.
Paperwork is the essence of every bureaucracy.
Let’s do it by the book: with paper.
This is from a series of pages on sources of federal war spending other than
the federal income tax and strategies that war tax resisters can use to reduce
their support of the government in these areas.
Active Methods of Depleting Government Coffers
Description
Anti-war activists turn to war tax resistance for any of a number of related
reasons: to amplify their protest, as a form of conscientious objection, or as
an attempt to reduce the resources available to the government to carry out
its wars.
If you are motivated by the last of these motivations, you may also be
interested in more active ways of reducing government coffers that go beyond
refusal to consent to taxation.
Some of these methods go pretty far afield from war tax resistance, and so
this page only mentions them in passing as examples of ways some resisters at
some times have chosen to actively deplete government resources that might
otherwise be spent on war.
Examples
Filing Paper Returns
These days, more and more people are filing their income tax returns
electronically. This saves the
IRS
money, as it costs about 35¢ on average for the agency to process an
electronically-filed return, compared to an average of $2.87 for a paper
return. You can reduce the efficiency of the government’s tax system, and
thereby the amount of collected taxes available for the government to spend on
the military, by filing paper returns rather than filing electronically.
George Jakabcin, the
IRS
assistant deputy associate chief information officer for systems integration,
said that if half of the people who currently file electronically switched
back to paper filing, “we would be in a world of hurt. 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 begin to argue that we are beginning to lose the expertise.”
In addition, the
IRS is
less able to track the items on paper returns, which limits the amount of data
available to its enforcement arm. Until everyone (or almost everyone)
switches to electronic filing, much of the information on everyone’s tax
return is unavailable to the
IRS’s
automated compliance checking programs. By filing a paper return, you help
diminish the ability of the
IRS to
go after tax resisters and evaders.
Disabling Tax-Collection Equipment
During the Vietnam War, anti-war activists in the United States interfered
with military conscription by destroying the files at draft boards. War tax
resisters might respond to the financial conscription of war taxes in an
analogous way.
Many historical populist tax resistance movements have included actions
intended to disable or destroy the tax collecting apparatus. For example:
A group in Arizona upset at automated traffic ticket-dispensing cameras
dressed up in Santa suits and disabled the cameras by wrapping them in
gift boxes.
Jack-a-Lents and “Rebeccaites” in England and Wales destroyed toll
booths.
Harassing Tax Collectors
Another way of making the government’s tax collection process less-efficient
and thereby making less money available to the government for war is to make
the jobs of tax collectors more difficult.
In , when two war tax resisters in the
Basque region of Spain were assessed a fine for their resistance, they
paid the fine with 20,000 pennies.
American revolutionaries famously used “tar and feathers” to show tax
collectors they were not wanted.
Many people in the American TEA
Party movement sent tea bags in with their tax returns. This seems benign
enough, but the IRS has seen
so many dangerous-looking things come to its mailrooms (razor blades,
powder meant to look like poison) that they tend to overreact and shut
down their operations for a hazardous materials team to come inspect
whenever they find anything out-of-the-ordinary in an envelope.
Applying for Government Handouts
Some resisters reason that it is not ethical to apply for government benefits
and other handouts while at the same time trying to resist some or all federal
taxes. Other resisters think that there is no contradiction between refusing
to pay for war and taking advantage of other parts of the government. Still
others think that any act that takes money from the government that it might
otherwise spend on war is probably a good thing and they seek to maximize the
amount of money they extract from the government.
Applying for Additional Tax Refunds
One way to take money out of the government’s pocket is to apply for tax
“refunds” above and beyond any that you are legally entitled to.
During the Vietnam War, it was common for American war tax resisters to do
this by declaring extra dependents on their tax returns. Martha Tranquilli,
for instance, on her income tax return
declared the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the War
Resisters League, the American Civil Liberties Union, the International League
for the Rights of Man, and the American Friends Service Committee as her
dependents. “By claiming these organizations,” she said, “this reduced my
taxable income by about 60 per cent, which would go to war. These groups were
entitled to my money. They were my dependents in as much as I support them.”
Now, with the expansion of the
IRS’s
use of the frivolous filing
penalty, this approach is more daunting.
Some people, including many who are imprisoned in the
U.S. prison system,
simply fabricate tax returns with numbers optimized to maximize the amount of
refundable tax credits and other refunds. For example, over a thousand
prisoners made implausible claims for the “first-time home-buyer tax credit” on
their returns and received over nine million dollars in refunds as a result.
“I’m through with the street crime,” said prisoner Shawn Clark, “I’m strictly
white collar from now on. I love the
IRS!”
Keeping Bureaucrats Busy with Worthless Paperwork / Overcompliance
The more time, effort, and money the government wastes on paperwork and
bureaucracy, the less time, effort, and money it has to devote to torturing
prisoners, bombing weddings, and launching invasions.
In , after the
IRS hit
war tax resister Karl Meyer with a “frivolous filing penalty,” he responded
with what he called “Cabbage Patch Resistance” — filing a new and different
tax return every day to flood the
IRS with
paperwork.
Destroying or Sabotaging Government Property
By destroying or sabotaging government property, you make it more expensive
for the government to do business, and thereby reduce the amount of money it
can spend on the activities, like war, it prefers to replacing damaged
equipment. Property with a direct link to the military is a favorite target.
Anti-war activists around Shannon Airport in Ireland on a number of occasions
disabled U.S.
military aircraft that were using that airport to ferry troops and supplies to
the Iraq War. For instance, Mary Kelly took an axe to a
U.S. Navy 737,
doing $1.5 million in damage, and Ulla Roder disabled a
RAF Tornado
fighter jet. Such activists have won surprising victories in court by
convincing juries that they were acting on the basis of necessity.
Another group disabled 35 refueling trucks at the Fairford military base in
England around the same time.
More recently, anti-war activists broke in to the
ITT/EDO-MGM arms factory in Brighton,
England to destroy equipment involved in the manufacture of parts for fighter
jets and guided missiles and bombs. Operating under cover of night, the
half-dozen decommissioners did about £250,000 in damage. A police inspector
said that “machinery and equipment were so targeted that it could have been
done with a view of bringing business to a standstill. The damage is
significant and the value substantial.” They were acquitted. One reacted to
the verdict by saying: “It’s a real victory for the anti-war movement, The
jury were presented with the facts and they supported our motivations. If
people in Britain knew the truth away from media manipulations they would all
support our actions.”
In a similar action, another set of activists did £350,000 of damage at a
Raytheon plant in Derry, Northern Ireland, and then were acquitted of all
charges by a unanimous jury after they argued that they were acting to prevent
war crimes. Raytheon’s
U.S.-side managers
concluded that “the legal system in Northern Ireland does not offer the degree
of protection to their business that could be expected in other parts of the
world,” and the company decided to abandon their Derry plant.
Encouraging Soldiers to Desert
Encouraging soldiers to desert or defy orders, supporting conscientious objectors, and counter-recruitment, are all ways of (among other things) making it more difficult and expensive for the government to maintain its ability to conduct wars.
Groups like Courage to Resist and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors do great work in this area.
War tax resisters can be particularly credible messengers in trying to
persuade military personnel to resist since we, too, are taking risks in our
noncompliance. Conversely, we can help to influence those who promote
conscientious objection in soldiers to practice it as taxpayers. As Thoreau
complained: “The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by
those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.”
Resigning Government Jobs
By resigning your government job, even one which is itself fairly benign, you
deprive the government of additional resources and force it to spend more on
replacing you. You also signal your disgust with the government’s activities
and your unwillingness to be associated with it. Gandhi and Tolstoy were
among the theorists of nonviolent resistance who made resignation of
government posts an important part of their strategic thinking.
Blockading Government Facilities
If you can prevent a government facility or that of a military contractor
from operating, to that extent you can cost the war machine time, money, and
other resources.
The ports in Tacoma, Washington, Oakland, California, and Olympia, Washington
have been successfully blockaded on occasion by anti-war protesters to prevent
the loading of ships destined for battlefields around the globe.
On the anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War in
, members of the War Resisters League were
arrested blockading the
IRS
building in Washington. “Just as military recruiters supply bodies for the
war, the
IRS
supplies the funding,” said war tax resister Ed Hedemann. “So, I’m doing my
part in disrupting that relentless flow of money by standing in front of the
IRS
entrance and by refusing to send my taxes to the
IRS.”
A campaign aimed at blocking the Government’s plans to introduce the community charge was launched yesterday on the eve of the Labour Party conference.
Supporters of the Scottish Campaign Against the Poll Tax (Stop It) believe they have found a loophole which will allow taxpayers to protest legally and at the same time cause a paperwork nightmare for the local councils which have to introduce the new system.
Stop It plans to distribute up to one million leaflets advising people to send back the forms they will be asked to fill in for a poll tax register, with a request for more information.
The return to sender plan has been welcomed by Labour leader Neil Kinnock who described the idea as “different and positive.”
At the campaign launch in Perth, Shadow Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar said the complexity of registration and collection threatened privacy and individual liberty.
The Government itself had provided the opportunity for a successful protest campaign, said Mr Dewar.
However, Environment Secretary Mr Nicholas Ridley said last night that if people failed to provide the relevant information within 21 days they would be in breach of the law.
“This is the effect of what the Labour Party are telling them to do.
“We have come to a sad pass when the Leader of the Opposition encourages people to act unlawfully.”
Next month registration officers will start sending out forms to individuals believed to be the “responsible person” in a household with a duty to supply information for the poll tax register.
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,” said Mr Dewar.
Labour MP Brian Wilson, chairman of 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.
He claimed that many Tories were coming to believe that the poll tax would be “the rock on which Mrs Thatcher finally founders.”
The new tax, a flat rate for every adult replacing domestic rates, is due to be introduced in Scotland .
Mr Eric Milligan, vice-president of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, said Cosla backed the campaign, although he was aware that it could cause a bureaucratic nightmare for registration officers and local government workers.
He said: “Scottish local government is almost unanimous in its opposition to the poll tax.
It stretches right across the political spectrum and it reaches communities that do not think of themselves as political.”
There are a number of motions on the poll tax for debate in Perth this weekend, although Mr Dewar said he would be very surprised if the conference endorsed a policy of non-payment.
According to a poll broadcast last night on Scottish Television, one in three Scots is prepared to break the law by refusing to pay the community charge.
The System Three poll was carried out and involved a sample of 948 adults throughout Scotland.
Mr Michael Connarty, chairman of Scottish Labour’s local government committee, said the party had to be prepared to give “full blooded support” to people who refuse to pay the poll tax.
An essential element of Greece’s recovery plan has been to collect more taxes from a population that has long engaged in tax avoidance.
The government is owed 45 billion euros in back taxes, tax officials in Athens said, only a fraction of which will ever be recovered.
To understand the difficulty, just talk to Nikos Maitos, a longtime official in Greece’s financial crimes investigation unit.
When he and a team of inspectors recently prowled the recession-hit island of Naxos for tax evaders, a local radio station broadcast his license plate number to warn residents.
“One repercussion of the crisis is that people are harder to find,” Mr. Maitos, an imposing, burly man, said last week in his sweltering office on the edge of Athens.
“And when you do find them, they don’t have money.”
Even tax collectors, who have had to take large pay cuts, find that budget reductions make it hard to pay for the gasoline needed to reach their targets.
“After two and a half years of austerity, it’s really a difficult time to bring in revenue,” said Harry Theoharis, a senior official in the Greek Finance Ministry who helps oversee the country’s tax payment system.
“You can’t keep flogging a dead horse.”
Income expected from a higher, 23 percent value-added tax required by the bailout agreement has fallen short by around 800 million euros in .
That is partly because cash-short businesses that were once law-abiding have started hiding money to stay afloat, tax officials said.
Greece’s General Accounting Office said recently that the state collected 25 percent less revenue in than it did .
To some extent, government officials said the tax-avoiding mentality is starting to change amid an aggressive enforcement campaign aimed at 500 wealthy individuals and companies, including former ministers and heads of state agencies and enterprises.
People took notice in when a former defense minister was arrested on charges of corruption and making false declarations related to his income and taxes.
“They are awed when they see inspectors now because of recent cases showing people will be prosecuted or made to pay,” Mr. Maitos said.
Tax collectors got another potential lift recently when the government started enforcing a law that gives them access to bank accounts of suspected tax evaders.
But Nikos Lekkas, a top official at the financial crimes agency where Mr. Maitos works, said Greek banks had obstructed nearly 5,000 requests for account data .
“The banks delay sending the information for 8 to 12 months,” he said.
“And when they do, they send huge stacks of documents to make it confusing.
By the time we can follow up, much of the money has already fled.”
In , the agency managed to assess back taxes worth 650 million euros on 210 of the cases, he said.
But only 65 percent could be collected.
One challenge lies in what Mr. Lekkas calls the big fish — 18,300 offshore businesses belonging to wealthy Greek individuals and companies.
Authorities are trying to trace the owners through property records, and they recently seized several large properties linked to offshore companies whose owners owe tens of millions of euros to the state.
That leaves collectors having to go after mostly smaller tax evaders, often with mixed results.
During a surveillance trip on the resort island of Santorini, Mr. Maitos said he and two colleagues observed a gas station owner insisting on cash-only transactions to avoid declaring taxes.
When confronted, the man lashed at them with a bullwhip while cursing the state for taking his money.
Danny Burns’s book Poll Tax Rebellion (AK Press, 1992) tells the story of the grassroots tax resistance campaign that sank the poll tax in Britain and dragged Margaret Thatcher’s decade-long reign as British prime minister down with it.
Background
Margaret Thatcher’s span as British prime minister included a paring down of the welfare state, aggressive attempts to reduce the power of organized labor, privatization and deregulation, and a flattening of the tax rate.
You may recognize this deck of cards as being similar to what Ronald Reagan played with in this same time period (), and indeed the two were influenced by a similar set of economists and ideologues.
The poll tax was meant to replace local property taxes, which had been set on a local, council-by-council basis.
Thatcher-aligned Conservatives disliked these property taxes, which were often raised by left-leaning local councils, and which applied only to property owners (or, indirectly, to renters).
Using an argument familiar to those following current debates about the personal income tax in the United States, these critics said that because many voters did not pay these taxes, but received the benefit of the government services the taxes paid for, they were biased toward ratcheting up the tax rate to effectively confiscate and redistribute wealth from property owners, which was unfair to those taxpayers and had negative consequences in general.
To fix this problem, they believed the tax should instead be applied to everybody alike.
And in case the resulting voter pressure wasn’t enough to keep the rates down, the central government should have the ability to cap the poll tax and prevent spendthrift councils from raising it too far.
And so the poll tax was born.
It faced immediate opposition, but at first it was unclear how this opposition would take form.
The Labour party wanted people to petition and protest against the tax, but they mostly wanted people to resent it and to identify it with the Conservatives because Labour saw it as a winning issue — the party had no interest in trying to actually defeat the tax as they felt it worked to their advantage.
In addition, Labour worried that if people tried to avoid the tax, for instance by not registering as residents of a tax district, they might also try to stay off the voter rolls and thus reduce Labour’s pool of potential voters.
To those targeted by the tax, though, resentment and protest were not going to be enough.
For people at the bottom of the income and wealth scale, the poll tax was a considerable hit, and resistance wasn’t just an option, but a necessity.
Mass-resistance to the tax was organized in a strikingly grassroots fashion, often confronting antagonism not only from the government but also from establishment opposition parties and organized labor.
The resistance to the poll tax was widespread, varied, and ultimately successful.
In 1990, Thatcher resigned as prime minister and a new team took over the Conservative party and immediately flung the albatross of the poll tax from its neck, replacing it with a tiered-rate property tax.
Today I’m going to review some of the tactics that made this campaign successful.
Propaganda and spin
The very name “poll tax” was a propaganda coup for the opposition.
The government had rolled out the program with the benign-sounding name “community charge,” but the “poll tax” name stuck.
Poll taxes are never popular, and resistance to poll taxes has a resonance in British history with previous popular struggles.
The victims of the poll tax were a sympathetic lot, including pensioners, the disabled, poor families, student nurses, and people with elderly live-in family members, and the resistance movement was not shy about using this to its advantage.
Public burning of tax bills, and frequent leafletting and postering kept the resistance in the public eye and made sure people knew there was an ongoing resistance campaign.
A community arts group created a travelling performance about the poll tax and how to resist it, and enacted it in various communities.
Take pride in resistance
Some councils tried the old trick of publishing a list of people who were behind on their taxes as a way of “shaming” them before their neighbors.
Instead, when this happened, people who were resisting their taxes but who were not on the list wrote letters-to-the-editor of the periodicals where the lists appeared to ask why their names had not been included on the roster.
Myth and legend
The resistance movement summoned up images from respected tax resistance campaigns of Britain’s past as a way to make its movement seem more respectable and part of a patriotic lineage.
There were references to the women’s suffrage movement and the American revolution, but even more often to Wat Tyler’s poll tax rebellion of .
The phrase “No Poll Tax Here,” seen on many of the signs and posters used by the resistance movement, also hearkened back to the Reform Act-related tax resistance of , in which people placed “No Taxes Paid Here” signs in their windows.
(The anti-poll tax resistance was so popular and successful that nowadays it is the model hearkened back to by movements like the current resistance to the Household Tax in Ireland.)
Surveys
On at least one occasion, the resistance movement took a door-to-door survey of households both to gauge their interest in resisting, and as a pretense to spread the resistance idea.
One result of the surveys was that between the people who planned to pay, and the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay was a large (55%) middle-ground of people who were sympathetic with resistance and would be willing to resist if they knew enough people were with them.
On seeing this result, Burns says, “we knew that non-payment was going to be massive.”
Another clever variety of survey was this:
[One] group then mass-produced a window poster which said “No Poll Tax Here.”
The poster was dropped through the letter-boxes of 2000 households and the group waited to see who put them up.
Posters appeared in about 100 windows.
Activists the went round and spoke to these people individually, inviting them to attend the next organising meeting…
Drown them with paperwork
Implementing the poll tax required registering everyone in the United Kingdom, and keeping track of them as they moved from one council district to another.
The people who designed the poll tax program underestimated how difficult it would be to do this adequately, even if there hadn’t been a lack of enthusiasm for the project by the individual councils or outright opposition from those being taxed.
Some of the earliest resistance tactics aimed at exacerbating this problem, and the only tactic promoted by the Labour party that could be described as an actual resistance tactic falls in this category:
[The “Stop It” campaign’s] one serious initiative was the “send it back” campaign, which told activists to return the registration forms and ask awkward questions of the council officers.
Its aim was to delay the system and to make “a legitimate protest.”
Burns notes that this was of questionable effectiveness, in part because it was not pursued very vigorously, and in part because by encouraging people to register in any form — even in a temporarily obstructionist way — this provided registration information to the poll tax collecting authorities that could later be used against resisters.
Clogging the bureaucracy with paperwork was nonetheless an effective tactic, particularly later in the resistance struggle as the councils had to go through the process of pursuing those who did not pay:
…councils were inundated with correspondence.
Many people genuinely didn’t understand what the Poll Tax was about.
Others mounted campaigns to delay registration by endlessly asking questions about the form.
All of these had to be answered.
Councils sat under a mountain of paper.
Everything they did seemed to create more work.
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.
If they attempt to canvas more people for registration they will also produce more people who will refuse to register.
―Poll Tax Legal Group
Make enforcement expensive
Whereas in the past, summonses issued by councils against people in arrears on their taxes had been pro forma things, rubber-stamped by judges without the summoned defendant even being expected to turn up — when people were given summonses for their poll taxes, the resistance movement encouraged them to go to court and to use whatever means they could to stretch out the time of their court appearance.
Mathematically, if even a fraction of the people summonsed actually turned up in court and were given even a few minutes of time to explain themselves, the courts would be unable to handle the load.
Local Anti-Poll Tax unions trained members in the law so they could help individual resisters stand up for their rights in court.
There were frequent examples in which thousands of summons were dismissed for technical errors or just because the courts were overwhelmed.
Warn people enforcers are coming
In a strategy modeled on one used in South Africa’s apartheid-era townships, neighborhoods declared themselves “no-go” areas for sheriffs, and posted watchouts to warn people if bailiffs or other enforcers were on the way.
Activists in Edinburgh formed a group called “Scum-busters” which was equipped with CB radios and squadrons of cars.
Telephone trees were organised; bailiff companies were monitored; their car registration numbers were taken and distributed to activists in all the local areas.
The Camden group recruited taxi firms to keep an eye out for bailiff vehicles while they did their rounds and to call in their spottings.
Try to win over tax collectors and collaborators
The movement tried, without success, to convince local councils — many of which were left-leaning and not sympathetic to Conservative policies — to resign their offices, or to illegally refuse to enact their budgets according to the poll tax law.
They also failed to convince the labor union representing the workers who worked in the bureau enacting the poll tax to refuse to implement the tax.
The movement had unexpected allies, of a sort, in the bailiffs who were assigned to distrain goods from tax defaulters.
Being used to unorganized, ashamed, impoverished pushovers, these collection agencies were overwhelmed by organized resistance and found themselves unable to recoup the expenses of collection.
For this reason some went bankrupt, while others were reluctant for merely financial reasons to handle cases of distraint for failure to pay poll tax.
Social boycott of tax collectors and collaborators
The movement also used the threat of shunning or boycott to discourage people from cooperating with the poll tax.
The government tried to recruit newsstands to be deposit points for poll tax payments, as convenient supplements for government-run depots like post offices.
But when the resistance movement got wind of this, “communities made it plain that they would no longer use the shops” of those who collaborated in this way.
Intimidate tax collectors and collaborators
In some cases, the intimidation went beyond threats of boycotts and shunning to vandalism and violence:
Windows have been smashed and graffiti daubed over businesses which have become agents… to collect the community charge… one agent in Patchway has now declined taking an agency after a brick was thrown through his window… [another] had the words “Poll Tax scab” and “you’re the first” scrawled in white paint across his window.
A Circle K store in Cardiff… had its door locks jammed with superglue.
Posters implicitly or explicitly threatening bailiffs and judges with lynch mob justice were not uncommon:
One showing a vicious dog, read “Bailiffs? Make my day!”
Another showing a picture of Malcolm X holding a machine gun [sic] looking out from behind the curtains, read: “Bailiffs we’re ready.”
A third showed a picture of a bailiff swinging in a noose.
It read “Dead bailiffs don’t knock on doors.”
In some areas bailiffs and registration officers were photographed and their portraits were reproduced on posters which read “wanted” and listed their “crimes.”
Some canvassers quit their jobs under the pressure of such violent threats, and one committed suicide with his family blaming it on being “sworn at and threatened” by those he encountered.
On one occasion, molotov cocktails were thrown at an (unoccupied) poll tax office.
A large group of protesters converged on and surrounded the home of the head of a bailiff company.
Finding him not at home, but his garage door open, they held a mock auction of his property.
Destroy or disable collection apparatus
There is one plausible story in the book of a poll tax office’s database being compromised and a large percentage of registered people being deleted from the system.
On one occasion, a bailiff’s vehicle had its tires slashed.
On another, resisters occupied the poll tax office, took up stations at the payment windows, and told people who had come by to pay their taxes to go home instead as the tax had been rescinded.
Blockades, occupations, and barricades
Several attempts by bailiffs to seize property from resisters were foiled by blockades of hundreds of protesters, several deep, surrounding the resister’s home and preventing access.
Sometimes this would extend to barricading the streets of a neighborhood, and in at least one case, of an entire town.
There were also several examples of groups of protesters occupying government and law-enforcement offices, courtrooms, and council chambers in such a way as to make business there come to a halt.
Publish and distribute how-to guides
A group of legal advisors assembled a series of bulletins and a how-to guide to help people become familiar with their legal rights and with the process the law was likely to take in their cases.
This gave them the confidence to pursue their resistance up to the limits of their comfort level, and also the techniques to make their resistance most effective.
Census resistance
Non-registration was as important as non-payment, and had to be pushed early in the campaign, while the Labour and other mainstream liberal opposition was still advising people to register but be angry about it.
When resisters were served with a liability order, it would be accompanied by a questionnaire that included questions about the resister’s employment (which could be used to help the government seize the resister’s paycheck).
Although it was legally mandatory to fill out these questionnaires, and penalties were threatened against those who refused, only about 15% of the people who received such questionnaires returned them.
Engender and maintain activism and solidarity
Everybody potentially had a role to play in the resistance.
People who did not owe tax could be legal advisors or join phone banks.
Even children served as lookouts to watch for bailiffs.
The most successful groups used a bottom-up organizing model, where most decisions were made independently in small, locally-convened groups of resisters.
This served to empower individuals and to encourage them to rely on their own initiative rather than on the decisions of a far-off activist elite.
Here’s an interesting technique for bringing people together:
An independent television company approached the Easton group in order to work with us on a film about the Poll Tax.
The film was never shown, but the way the community was engaged in the process of making it is instructive.
The film producers wanted a shot of all the doors in the street, opening one by one as the occupants came out of their houses with banners and signs.
Charles, the local street rep, went round to people’s houses every evening for a week and explained to them what was wanted.
Out of 30 houses in the street (a cul-de-sac) 28 agreed to participate.
The street is multi-racial with a fairly wide class mix.
It was inspiring to see white working class men standing shoulder to shoulder with Asian women and their kids, holding the same banners and engrossed in conversation.
Some of them had never spoken to each other before.
…[V]irtually every one of those households joined the Union, and most still had posters in their windows a year later.
People were brought into the campaign, not through a leaflet or a canvasser, but through an interesting activity.
They didn’t have to go to the campaign, it came to them.
Support and assist arrested & imprisoned resisters
When people received summonses, they could call a hotline number to get an information package in the mail.
These numbers were posted on walls and utility poles all over.
Volunteers were given legal training so that they could help summonsed people as informal legal advisors, and a more formal and credentialed legal advisory group in turn advised them.
Brian Wright, the first resister imprisoned for failure to pay, got 800 cards and letters from well-wishers while in jail, and hundreds demonstrated outside his cell.
The police cracked down on anti-poll tax demonstrations, in what seemed to the demonstrators like a deliberate attempt to turn them into bloodbaths, intimidate people from participating, and divide the movement into “lawless” and “respectable” factions.
This seemed to work to some extent, at first, as some prominent spokespeople for the anti-poll tax movement distanced themselves from those arrested for “rioting.”
But an independent group formed and dedicated itself to defending anyone arrested at these demonstrations, and organized itself in such a way as to be solely representative of the defendants (not of any other organization).
Volunteers were sent to every police station to welcome demonstrators as they were bailed out, and the organization was able to share resources (like videotape disproving police testimony) and tactics among legal teams representing different defendants.
…a prisoners support group was set up… supporting 27 long-term prisoners. …
The TSDC made sure each prisoner was written to at least once a week by members of the campaign and visits to prisoners were coordinated through the campaign.
Those who had been inside offered support and advice to those who were about to be convicted, and a newsletter was produced which published the letters of prisoners.
The campaign… paid for newspapers and books; a Walkman cassette player for every prisoner; £10 a month income (the maximum they are allowed).
In addition to this some of the families were offered limited financial support for visits…
Conclusion
The resistance campaign that defeated the poll tax was diverse and creative in its tactics, and its success makes it a model worth learning from.
Danny Burns’s book about the campaign is a helpful overview of these tactics and of the dynamics of how they were applied.
an early tax form, from when paperwork was fired in clay
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, , 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 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 , 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 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 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 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.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
1984 brought the Friends Journal’s second special issue on war taxes, at a time when even its critics acknowledged war tax resistance as a mainstream practice in the Society of Friends.
In a letter-to-the-editor in a issue of the Journal, Tim Deniger, a supporter of the World Peace Tax Fund legislation, had pointed out some of its flaws, for instance that it “does not address the problem of spending for defense versus social welfare; it is simply a bookkeeping proposition which would ease the consciences of pacifists.”
(See ♇ .)
Bill Strong wrote back, and, in a letter that appeared in the issue, defended the bill against its critics.
Excerpts:
[T]he World Peace Tax Fund Bill…[’]s enactment won’t lessen defense spending; Congress will still need to do that.
What it will do is establish a Peace Trust Fund (like the eminently successful highway trust fund), enabling our society to make a striking (i.e., dollar-worthy) commitment to seeking peace (via, for example, funding a peace academy, U.N. peacekeeping forces, the use of mediation, negotiation, and reconciliation techniques — none of which are currently part of U.S. commitments).
As to alternative service for war tax dollars being but an “accounting illusion” or only easing the consciences of pacifists, the same applies to the now-established alternative service of C.O.s. Although men choose alternative service, our government has never lacked the bodies to pursue any conflict any place, any time; but the C.O.’s personal witness still stands for what it is, a man’s conscientious decision not to be a part of the war system.
If we could have C.O. status for men over 20 and all women, allowing them not to pay for war but to have their tax dollars go toward peacemaking, our society would make a new and totally different kind of statement to this violence-weary world.
There’s a little bit of sleight-of-hand here in comparing people who would pay their taxes into a government-run alternative fund with only those conscientious objectors who would be willing to enter government-run “alternative service” in lieu of combat roles (as opposed to the many conscientious objectors who refused to be conscripted into any service whatsoever).
But it’s also important to note that these earlier versions of the “peace tax” scheme were much more conscientious about segregating the “peace tax” payments so that they would pay for new, additional, nonviolent, peace-seeking measures.
This enabled promoters to make a much stronger case in favor of the bill than today’s poor “Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund” promoters — who have to somehow defend the idea that “peace tax” payers’ dollars will somehow magically get routed just toward the non-military portions of the government’s usual budget.
the cover of the issue of Friends Jounal
The issue of Friends Journal was dedicated to “Our Taxes and Peace” — the second such issue devoted to the war tax issue that I found in the archives.
Vinton Deming, a war tax resister and now the Editor-Manager of the Journal, introduced the issue.
Excerpts:
[W]hat can we do, many of us are asking, to stop the flow of our tax money to the Pentagon?
It feels as if the Society of Friends has come more under the weight of this concern in the past year.
My yearly meeting (Philadelphia) wrestled with the question of tax resistance a year ago, and monthly meetings have been asked to consider the question further as they prepare for yearly meeting sessions this month.
Within my own monthly meeting I have attended clearness meetings this year for members seeking direction and support on the issue.
And I have seen a marked increase in the number of members taking tentative steps to withhold at least a portion of their taxes.
Reports from abroad include London Yearly Meeting’s minute of support this past summer for its employees who seek to hold back the military portion of their taxes.
Robert F. Tatman proposed a Minute on the subject, confidently presenting a target that was well in front of what any meeting had been prepared to accept thus far.
Excerpts:
[W]e are led to declare for ourselves that all participation in war and preparation for war — in any form — is contrary to the Spirit and teachings of Christ.
By this, we mean that membership in the armed forces of the United States or of any country, whether under arms or as a noncombatant; participation in, including registration under, a system of military conscription; acceptance of the privilege of alternative service as a conscientious objector; payment through taxes, both direct and indirect, for wars past, present, and future; and all other forms of participation in the war system, which now holds the world in such deep oppression, are in direct opposition to the Peace Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends.
Friends are advised to examine themselves, their finances, their possessions, and all of their associations to discover whether they are clear of such participation in war and preparation for war, and if they are not, to seek guidance and support from their monthly meetings in their efforts to attain clearness.
We accept that this search for clearness will inevitably bring us, both individually and corporately, into conflict with the laws of the United States and of other countries, and we pledge our full moral, spiritual, and financial support to any Friend or meeting in need of such support as a result of this minute.
We realize that there are many Friends who will not be in full unity with this minute at present, who will feel it is their duty as U.S. citizens to continue paying the taxes demanded of them by the federal government, and to support and counsel cooperation with military conscription.
We recognize the depth of their convictions but stand in loving disagreement with them, and we pledge them, too, our full moral, spiritual, and financial support as they struggle to reach clearness on this concern laid upon us by the Lord.
We are indeed loyal citizens of the United States, but first we are citizens of the Kingdom of God, and the higher law must always take precedence over the lower.
Kingdon W. Swayne went the opposite direction, feeling that Friends had gotten too carried away with war tax resistance and ought to reconsider.
Excerpts:
Most of the current discussion of “war” taxes within the Society of Friends is based on the implicit assumption that those who don’t pay them are morally superior to those who do.
The charge of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to that of is to come up with a “stronger minute” on war tax concerns than the one currently on the books, clearly implying that greater “strength” in this area must be morally superior.
In a discussion several months ago at Representative Meeting in Philadelphia, those who obey the law were compared to the Quaker slaveholders of , and not a dissenting voice was raised.
As a member of the substantial majority of Friends who are dutiful taxpayers, I have felt intuitively that my position has every bit as good a moral claim as the contrary view.
I have sought to examine that intuition in two ways: first, to identify the moral assumptions that underlie it and, second, to identify the moral ambiguities in the tax refuser position that render it unattractive to me on moral grounds.
Swayne argued:
It is important to him to be a vigorous participant in the various “circles of community” that he finds himself in, and only to be a disruptive force in those circles in the most extreme circumstances, when productive participation is no longer possible.
He feels that the national circle in the United States has not reached such a stage, and so it’s better to play by the rules.
Friends overemphasize “the dramatic, large-scale evils associated with the national security system” while remaining indifferent to other man-made sources of suffering, for instance “our transportation system [which] has brought more death and injury to U.S. citizens than all the wars of .”
The national security establishment is just a large-scale version of such thoroughly moral defenses as “police forces and locks on houses” — they are not evil in and of themselves, though they can be used in evil ways or can become aggrandized in an evil way.
But war tax resistance treats them as pure evil.
He then described the varieties of resister: the one who reduces his or her income below the tax line (the “most admirable” variety, according to Swayne), the one who tries “limiting but not eliminating federal income tax liability, and paying the required tax” (Swayne considers himself one of these, saying he “does so from prudential rather than pacifist motives” because “I think I give money away more wisely than does Uncle Sam”), and the one who refuses a symbolic “military” percentage of the federal income tax (this, he calls the “mainstream” variety).
He sees problems with this third variety:
It actually means the government gets more money in the end.
The calculation of the “military” percentage is flawed.
“It requires one to assert unequivocally that one’s own reading of the will of God is superior to that of others, not only with respect to goals but with respect to the tactics needed to achieve those goals.”
By filing legal cases contesting government actions against resisters, these resisters undermine their moral position, becoming not civilly disobedient martyrs but mere plaintiffs.
Such war tax resisters incorrectly deny that their position sets a precedent for tax resisters of all sorts.
Law-breaking reflects poorly on the peace movement in the court of public opinion.
But, he concluded:
As for the tax refusers, I hope other Quaker taxpayers will join me in accepting their position, despite its ambiguities, as being in the mainstream of Quaker thought, and therefore entitled to support from Quaker bodies.
I will support them not out of a sense that theirs is the morally superior position, but only because they are taking a greater risk.
Following that, Franklin Zahn promoted phone tax resistance as “a simple way of continuing Friends’ tradition of witnessing for peace.”
He first wrote about why resistance was important (indeed, he felt, as a regressive tax at a time of reduced social welfare spending and tax cuts for the rich, resisting this particular tax could be justified even without reference to military spending), and then explained the mechanics of how to resist and how the phone company is likely to respond.
No one has ever been jailed for refusing the telephone war tax.
Although the tax is small, its refusal by thousands of Friends could be a significant force for peace.
Gandhi, for instance, made good use of a very small salt tax.
Being “effective,” however, need not be the main motive in refusals.
A draft-aged person refuses induction not primarily to be effective but because it is immoral to support war.
The same motivation can apply for tax refusers.
There was also a brief note in that issue about a new “study document” from the National Council of the Churches of Christ on “The Churches and War Tax Resistance,” but it didn’t give much indication about the content or the context in which it had been produced.
The issue brought the news that a group of “peace tax fund” promoters in Canada had incorporated and were planning to pursue a test case in the courts that they hoped would establish a right to conscientious objection to military taxation under the new Canadian Constitution.
Kingdon Swayne’s challenge to what he identified as the orthodox Quaker position in favor of war tax resistance drew some responses that were printed in the issue.
Roland Smith, “a rather recent tax refuser,” thought Swayne’s criticism was “helpful” but not always correct.
In particular, he didn’t think that it was true that war tax resistance always would mean the government would come out ahead in the end, and he felt that the difficult (Swayne called it “arbitrary”) practice of trying to discern the military portion of your tax bill represented “not a drawback but… an opportunity for the refuser to exercise his or her conscience in deciding which percentage of which budget figure to use.”
More troubling, he thought, was the threat to democracy embodied in the idea that people could conscientiously choose to support some decisions of their elected representatives and not others.
Irving Hollingshead denied that “self-righteousness” was behind war tax resistance.
“The moral point is that war and the preparation for mass killing are wrong, and most Friends feel a moral obligation to oppose it.
Tax resistance is merely one tactic consistent with this moral position.”
Tor J.S. Bejnar looked at Swayne’s three varieties of resister and decided that the second variety, to which Swayne (and until recently, Bejnar) belonged, “barely connects spiritual and earthly matters” and so he has decided to move into the first category, which he termed “deliberate poverty.”
Alan Eccleston was glad to see that Friends were “open[ing] ourselves to the question” rather than evading it.
He felt that framing the issue as being about “moral superiority” was counter-productive and judgmental.
And he also felt that more important than strong Minutes from Meetings about war tax resistance was “the continuous witness of those who, under a concern, constantly hold the question before us through their own loving commitment.”
My personal experience suggests that we feel most anxious when we are in a stage of determined avoidance, when, intuitively, we sense something stirring within us for which we believe we are not ready.
All of our defenses are mobilized and we shut ourselves off from that inner stirring — but at a price!
Scott Crom questioned the consequentialism implicit in Swayne’s critique.
“[S]ometimes we are called upon to act in certain ways, or refrain from acting, regardless of the consequences.
Here one does not judge the morality of a choice by its results or its impact, but by something else.
This approach is the one I prefer, and I believe it has ample precedent, both in the Bible and in Quaker history.
The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount do not say, ‘Thou shalt accomplish such-and-such,’ but speak directly to actions and to attitudes.”
Ben Norris wrote that “Some Quakers are motivated especially towards striving to keep their own lives pure, simple, or consistent, and this inner spiritual state is the focus.
Others note that it is quite impossible to exist outside of some sort of economic and social system… and therefore, such an action as war tax refusal is part of a vastly complex involvement in responsible citizenship, the right ordering of our economic and social systems. Both motivations may exist in the same person.
But to concentrate on which person’s actions, public or private, are ‘more moral’ than someone else’s usurps a judgment not given to mortals, and trivializes both the spiritual and political motivations of rational change in our lives.”
Karl Meyer wrote in to promote his “cabbage patch” method of tax resistance:
the Internal Revenue Service began using a special $500 penalty against people who make protest claims on income tax returns.
This “frivolous tax return” penalty is a significant and intolerable assault on the inalienable rights of freedom of speech and religion.
It seems to me both a challenge and an opportunity for mass civil disobedience by people of conscience.
The only act needed is to assert the rights of conscience on an income tax form.
As an experiment in showing the way, I have begun to file daily protest returns for each day of .
My net income from my work as a carpenter in will be reported and distributed on 365 tax returns, at an average of about $38 per day.
Each return will be addressed to a different employee or office of IRS.
A copy of the daily return will be sent each day to a different newspaper, magazine, public officeholder, or peace organization.
If the IRS imposes penalties for all of my returns, the total assessment may rise to more than $180,000. I have already received notice of one penalty for $500. Of course I don’t intend to pay or allow collection.
I invite Friends to join with me in resisting war taxes and this penalty on the expression of conscience.
This is a good project for people like me, who feel able to protect their income and assets from seizure by IRS.
Some others, whose assets are more vulnerable to collection, may participate by filing protest statements on tax return forms, in the names of some of the victims of U.S. militarism worldwide.
G.M. Smith trotted out the argument that paying taxes is no more of a moral issue because of how the government will spend the money, than handing your wallet over to a violent mugger is because of how he might spend the loot.
He suggested instead of tax resistance that people donate (in a tax-deductible way) to charity.
“Thus, through contributions one could reduce his or her tax liability legally and at the same time be contributing to good in the world.
It is important, however, not to make one’s contributions in a tax-supported area.
There’s nothing government would like better than to dump the entire burden of social services on the private sector and have all those extra tax dollars for bombs.”
Robert R. Schutz questions Swayne’s casual assumption that because the national security apparatus is something like the local police apparatus writ large (and the police are something like the locks on our doors anthropomorphized and handed pistols) that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a military.
Schutz agrees with the theory but denies Swayne’s conclusion.
Rather: “The use of police power may be even less morally defensible than war because it is deliberate, pre-planned, cold-blooded, and because it is entirely mercenary — we hire other people to do our killing for us.”
A report on the annual Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in the same issue noted that “[m]uch of Saturday was taken up with Friends’ wrestling with war tax concerns.”
The minute which finally resulted said, in part, that “Friends are uneasy in conscience that a substantial portion of their tax dollars goes for military purposes”; that we “are ready to support a wide variety of approaches to war tax witness in accord with individual circumstances and leadings”; that “while Friends do not urge one another to undertake civil disobedience, Friends are ready to give strong support to members led to refuse payment of taxes for military purposes”; and that “most Friends strongly endorse passage of the World Peace Tax Fund legislation.”
The minute concluded, “We realize that we have no single or simple answer to the dilemma of praying for peace and paying for war.
We ask for Divine Guidance as we proceed in struggling with the issue of taxes levied for war-related purposes.”
The issue will be considered again at the sessions.
In the issue was a letter from Donna and Jerome Gorman in which they explained how they had extended tax resistance-like techniques to a State-level battle against capital punishment.
They held back a symbolic 1¢ from their electric bill to protest against the Virginia Electric and Power Company’s complicity with the state’s electrocution method of executing prisoners, and later began to also withhold 1¢ from their phone bills in a similar protest because of a state excise tax on phone service.
They saw this largely as a method of getting the attention of people to whom they could then direct anti-death-penalty outreach.
We refer to this economic and tax resistance as “penny resistance.”
Multiple innovations in economic and tax and other forms of resistance are most urgently needed to impede the various methods of carrying out capital punishment.
We pray and we hope that many others will consider joining in this resistance.
Jeff Hunn promoted the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund in the issue.
He described it this way:
The Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund is a sort of “mutual aid fund” for war tax resisters.
Formed in , the Penalty Fund is supported by people who contribute small amounts of money periodically to help war tax resisters pay fines and interest levied by the IRS.
Funds contributed are used to help pay not the resister’s original tax burden but what the IRS terms “statutory additions”: interest, penalties, and fines imposed because of war tax resistance.
When each supporter contributes his or her small amount, the total becomes enough to reimburse the resister for the additional cost of his or her witness.
For example, 200 supporters contributing $2.50 each could cover the aforementioned $500 “frivolous” penalty.
The Tax Resisters’ Penalty Fund has grown from 85 supporters in to 400 supporters .
The larger we grow, the bigger an impact we can make and the smaller each supporter’s contribution will need to be.
Finally, in the issue, Dan Merritt reminded people that phone tax resistance was still a good option, and noted that the Claremont, California, Friends Meeting had been refusing to pay the phone tax since the Vietnam War.
Before the U.S. federal government “shutdown,” back in , I ordered a batch of this year’s tax forms from the IRS.
I like to file on paper, rather than electronically, in part because if we all did that we’d bring the IRS to its knees.
But anyway… during the “shutdown” the IRS sent me a letter saying it had gotten my order but would not be able to fulfill it right away.
Here we are in mid-February, three weeks after the “shutdown” ended, and I’m still waiting.
That’s just a superficial indication of the chaos that’s roiling the already-overtaxed (ha!) agency.
Years of increasing responsibilities, budget cuts, blows to employee morale, and ever-more-dilapidated IT infrastructure (“profoundly archaic”, one recent report put it, and risking a “catastrophic systems collapse”) have taken their toll.
Hiring freezes have led to a graying workforce that is retiring in droves.
The “shutdown” was further insult to the injuries.
And that, in a year when the agency has had to change its rules and processes to deal with a new tax law and the most radically restructured tax forms in recent memory.
That all requires employee retraining which was supposed to have been happening in the weeks leading up to tax filing season, that is, the time when the agency had to shut its doors and send its seasonal employees home.
The new federal income tax law that goes into effect this filing season was the usual slapdash exercise in political posturing and lobbyist pissing matches.
Naturally a plethora of loopholes and shelters bubbled to the surface after the ooze settled.
A set of tax law experts has made “an effort to supply the analysis and deliberation that should have accompanied the bill’s consideration and passage,“ and they conclude that “[m]any of the new changes fundamentally undermine the integrity of the tax code and allow well-advised taxpayers to game the new rules through strategic planning.”
Details here: The Games They Will Play: Tax Games, Roadblocks, and Glitches Under the 2017 Tax Legislation
After all of the talk of tax cuts, Americans may be surprised at getting fewer, smaller, and later-to-arrive income tax refunds than they’re used to this year.
While that’s not a very meaningful metric in the big scheme of things, it is something that can contribute to the degradation of taxpayer morale, as many taxpayers — subconsciously or merely short-sightedly — see their tax refund as a measure of how generous or costly the government is to them.
The usual stories about massively profitable companies like Netflix or Amazon not paying taxes (or indeed getting tax refunds) are also doing the rounds and eroding taxpayer morale this year.
Susanne Großmann of Pax Christi and Netzwerk Friedenssteuer attempted last week to appeal for a refund of 5% of her taxes, on conscientious objection to military taxation grounds.
The Forest Fields & Hyson Green Anti-Poll Tax Campaign put out a newsletter called Poll-Axe!
It was among the regional anti-poll tax groups, and described itself this way in the newsletter’s inaugural issue:
Our policy, evolved by consensus of our active members, is to build a non-payment campaign, to urge non-implementation of the Poll-Tax, and to delay the registration process.
However, we aim to embrace all forms of opposition to the Poll Tax and welcome new ideas and different views.
We are a broad-based local campaign consisting of people of various political persuasions.
Their newsletter contains a lot of good details about the tactics they put into play to defeat the poll tax.
Another article in that first issue described a visit from a campaigner from Scotland who described the anti-poll tax campaign there.
(The government rolled out the poll tax in Scotland one year before trying it elsewhere in Britain, so this allowed both sides of the conflict to refine tactics.)
Excerpt:
Despite threats of imprisonment to non-payers, there has been no such evidence of this happening in Scotland.
People claiming benefits are wiser to simply not pay the Poll Tax as the fine is less than the payments themselves (the Government is only allowed to confiscate £1.75 a week from your benefit and that starts from when they catch up with you!).
Whole estates in Scotland are simply refusing to pay and Poll Tax collectors and bailiffs have been chased away by angry residents.
A million people have not paid their Poll Tax.
A later issue noted that the Forest Fields & Hyson Green group had decided to “twin” with their counterparts in the Prestonfields & District Anti-Poll Tax Group in Edinburgh in a sort of “sister cities” relationship.
Other articles described (somewhat vaguely) outreach to NALGO, the union representing the government desk employees who would be responsible for implementing the poll tax.
The anti-poll tax campaigners hoped to drum up some resistance from within the bureaucracy.
Issue #2 gave this advice for people on delaying poll tax registration:
Registration: What to Do Next?
If you haven’t sent back your registration form yet, you will have had a letter from the council threatening you with a £50 fine.
So what should you do now?
We advise you to ignore it.
They [cannot fine you unless they prove that] you got their letters.
They can only prove this
if they were hand delivered to you personally, or
if they were sent by recorded delivery, or
if you tell them.
They will probably send a poll tax snooper to your house.
Don’t tell the snooper — or anyone else from the council — that you have had poll tax forms.
You must not admit that you’ve had anything from them about the poll tax, or they can fine you £50.
When the snooper calls, it’s best to pretend there’s nobody in.
If this isn’t possible, get rid of them quickly.
They’ll try to get you to fill in a form on the doorstep.
Try not to do this.
Tell them you’re about to go out, have a bath, feed the baby — any excuse will do.
But you must take a form from them.
Once you’ve done this you must reply within 21 days.
This isn’t the only option.
We have a leaflet setting out other ways to delay registration — get one from our stall every Saturday at Hyson Green crossroads.
Most important of all, don’t sit at home worrying about it.
If you’re worried about it — fill the form in and send it back.
Delaying registration is only a small part of our protest.
The main thing will be to refuse payment when the first bills arrive next April.
If you need any advice, contact us.
A later article expanded on this advice: “they can’t force you to fill in a form there and then.
You have to take a registration form from them, or you might be fined.
They’ll probably try to arrange a time to collect it: Pick a time when you know that nobody will be at home.” That article also recommended:
Tell your friends and neighbours that snoopers are in the area
Follow them around — this will worry them, and might stop them harassing people on their own doorsteps
Remember that the snoopers are nervous because they know they’re unpopular
The same article noted “we’ve heard that snoopers all over Nottingham are not bothering to knock on doors where an anti-poll tax poster is in the window.
They say it isn’t worth the bother.”
And they reiterated that non-registration was just a delaying tactic, and not worth fighting to the bitter end: “It’s not worth getting fined over refusing to register… Refusing to register is a criminal offense (unlike refusing to pay), and it won’t stop the poll tax because they’ll only get your name from one of their computers.
Our aim is to make registration as difficult as we can without getting fined.”
An Edinburgh Evening News article reproduced in the second newsletter concerned the occupation of a sheriff office in Leith.
Excerpts:
About 40 of them crammed into the sheriff officers premises in Constitution Street, locked the doors and singing [sic] anti-poll tax songs and staging a mock auction of equipment and furnishings.
Staff fled from the public counter.
One of the organisers, Bob Goupillot…, said the aim was to show people they need not be intimidated into paying the poll tax.
“If sheriff officers think they can threaten people by saying they are going to sell off their belongings, they will find we can retaliate by harassing them in a similar way,” he added.
Among the placard and banner-carrying demonstrators was university lecturer John Holloway… who said sheriff officers told him they were going to sell off his property after he refused to register for poll tax.
“They came to my door about eight weeks ago and carried out a poinding on my stereo,” he added.
“I went to my local anti-poll tax group and together with the Lothian Federation of Anti-Poll Tax Groups we warned them there would be massive resistance if they tried to carry out a warrant sale.
I have heard nothing since.
“It is important we let the public know they should not be intimidated into paying this unjust tax, which redistributes money from the poor to the rich.”
One issue of the newsletter introduced a paperwork monkeywrenching campaign it called “Operation ‘Tell Sid’ ”:
We’re going to make the poll tax unworkable, and we’ve thought of some fun ways of doing it.
Here’s the first:
To collect the poll tax, they need to know where we all live.
If the register of people who should pay isn’t accurate, they’ve got problems.
The more inaccurate it is, the more problems they’ve got.
So…
We’ve obtained a lengthy list which members will be given, and is available at meetings and at our stall.
On it are the names and personal details of some local people who will gain from the poll tax: judges, company directors, freemasons, and other undesirables.
Get a copy of the list and pick out a name.
Then, next time you’ve got a spare ten minutes, write a letter pretending to be this person.
Send it to Sidney Stares — he’s our Community Charge (poll tax) Registration Officer.
Here’s what you should Tell Sid:
The person’s name and current address
Their date of birth
That they are moving house
Their new address: this can be an empty house, a non-existent address, or something vague like “abroad” or “London”
The date they moved or are moving
Once you’ve sent a few letters like this one and got bored, you can start to play a slightly different game.
Invent a name — or use somebody who’s famous: a real person, a character from your favourite soap — it doesn’t matter.
Be this person.
Write and Tell Sid that you have just moved into the Nottingham area.
Pick an address from the list, and Tell Sid that’s where you are living.
It’s as simple as that.
By itself, this won’t stop the poll tax — but every little helps, so get writing now.
A report from the Scottish sister-city campaigners, in the issue, noted that enforcement threats there had thusfar proven empty:
There are two reasons why no warrant sales have taken place yet.
First of all, there are only a handful of sheriff officers in Lothian but over 70,000 non-payers.
Second, each time sheriff officers turn up at someone’s house (and they’ve only attempted it twice so far in the whole of Edinburgh), they are met by a crowd of angry anti-poll tax campaigners who stop them from getting in!
Lothian council are also trying to get poll tax from people by taking it straight from their bank accounts.
They don’t need the person’s permission to do this, but there are some rules.
The account has to be in credit, they aren’t allowed to make anyone overdrawn, and they can only seize any money that’s in the account on the day they freeze it.
Officially, bank staff have to co-operate with this system — it’s the law.
Unofficially, they’re helping people to avoid payment by letting them run their accounts on a permanent overdraft, without making any charges.
Non-payers are being given help by their banks to juggle money from one account to another.
If the council applies to freeze the account of someone who hasn’t plaid their poll tax, then on any one day it will only have a few pounds in it at most — and that’s all they can take.
And in many cases, people have had phone calls from their bank managers, telling them that an arrestment order has arrived and suggesting that they come in for a chat to sort something out!
The issue reported that enforcement was proving just as difficult outside of Scotland:
Attempts to recover poll tax debts have failed.
In eighteen months not one warrant sale — the Scottish equivalent of bailiffs — has been carried out.
In South Wales, residents have blockaded whole villages to keep the bailiffs out.
In Northampton, their office was fire-bombed only three days after their first failed attempt to seize poll tax arrears.
Closer to home, the bailiffs sent in by Rushcliffe Council in West Bridgford failed to recover any poll tax at all, and the council have now written asking non-payers to “make them an offer…[”]!
In Beeston, Broxtowe Council served bailiffs notices on people — but when the bailiffs returned they failed to get into anyone’s house.
They picked a day when we had two sets of court hearings to cover — one of them 20 miles away in Bingham.
Yet we still managed to mount a watch outside the bailiffs headquarters on Hucknall Road.
When the bailiffs left there at 9.15 a.m. messages went out all over the city, and a Scumbusters squad was out on the streets of Beeston within minutes.
We followed them for a few hours — they were ducking in and out of car parks and estates trying to “lose” us — then they ran home with their tails between their legs.
This comes from an “Special Issue”.
By this time, the government had decided to give up on the poll tax, but it was still in effect at a reduced rate until they figured out a replacement.
This on the one hand was a tremendous victory, but on the other took some of the wind out of the sails of the opposition, which worried that if it declared victory and slacked off on refusal the government might sneak the poll tax back under a new name and would continue to try to take reprisals against determined resisters:
Bailiffs
and how to beat them!
The first thing to remember about bailiffs is that they aren’t likely to visit you.
There are only a handful of them, and 60,000 of us — so the chances of them coming to your door are pretty slim.
The second thing to remember is that if you follow these simple rules, they can’t touch you:
Never let them into your house
Keep ground floor doors and windows locked
Phone us as soon as you hear from them
Bailiffs are just like vampires: invite them in once and they can come back at any time, using force if they have to.
But if you never let them get past your front door, they can’t ever touch you!
The council are also using Recovery Officers to try and get us to pay the poll tax.
These do the same job as bailiffs, but don’t have the same powers.
If someone comes to your door, it’s more likely to be a Recovery Officer than a bailiff — but you can only find out by talking to them, which isn’t a good idea because they try and trick people.
The best thing to do is politely tell them that you’re busy and close the door in their face.
Then phone us as soon as you can.
If you have a room in a shared house, make sure that other people living there know to keep the front door locked.
If the bailiffs get past the front door, they are allowed to smash down other doors to help them carry out their dirty work.
Put a notice on the inside of the front door, to remind the other people you share with.
Sometimes, they push a letter through your door threatening to come back in a week or so and steal your things.
It’s almost always just a bluff, and they go away and annoy someone else instead.
But sometimes they leave a date and time that they’ll be coming back.
If you get a letter like this, let us know.
Tell us when they’re coming, and we’ll arrange a street party to welcome them.
They’ll be sorry they ever showed their faces.
Bailiffs cannot break into our homes or use the police to get into our property.
They can enter our property if a door is unlocked or if one of our windows is open.
If you live in a property which has an outer door and one or more inner doors you must insure that the outer door is locked at all times.
If this outer door is unlocked the bailiffs can use force to open the second, inner door.
Bailiffs may try and persuade us to let them in by saying they just want to talk and that they don’t intend taking anything.
We shouldn’t be fooled by this — once in they can value our things and then come back another time and legally take them by force.
So we have to be on our guard at all times with the best advice being:
Don’t let them in!
Another thing we could get into the habit of doing is closing our curtains when we go out.
This will prevent the bailiffs looking through our windows to value our things.
A page in the issue highlighted the work of the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign, and encouraged readers to support imprisoned resisters by writing letters to them (it gave a list of several prisoners along with their mailing addresses), visiting them, and helping to fund their prison canteen accounts.
Some tabs that have passed through my browser in recent days:
Two limericks I wrote, inspired by current events, were selected for the Center for a Stateless Society’s poetry feature.
Ruth Benn, at NWTRCC’s blog, takes aim at the “All or Nothing Syndrome” in which some people give up on doing war tax resistance at all because they don’t feel capable of going all-in and resisting everything.
Peace activists in Ireland who broke into Shannon Airport to decommission U.S. military aircraft stationed there have been found not guilty by a jury, who apparently agreed with the defense argument that they were lawfully justified in their actions.
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.
[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 , is meant to pressure the government to repair roads and bridges in the region.
Democrats in Congress are having more trouble than expected getting everyone in and out of the clown car.
The upshot is that the painstakingly-negotiated “Build Back Better Act” is in jeopardy — along with the $80 billion in new IRS funding that was part of the bill.
was surely the most challenging year taxpayers and tax professionals have ever experienced — long processing and refund delays, difficulty reaching the IRS by phone, correspondence that went unprocessed for many months, collection notices issued while taxpayer correspondence was awaiting processing, limited or no information on the Where’s My Refund? tool for delayed returns, and — for full disclosure — difficulty obtaining timely assistance from TAS.
, examination coverage has decreased, enforcement efforts have been negatively impacted, and the Level of Service has continued to drop as the IRS’s workforce and budget have declined.
On the resources side, the IRS’s baseline budget has been reduced by about 20 percent on an inflation-adjusted basis , and its workforce has shrunk by about 17 percent.
There is no way to sugarcoat in tax administration: From the perspective of tens of millions of taxpayers, it was horrendous.
[T]he number of individual income tax returns the IRS receives — a reasonable approximation of its workload — has increased by 19 percent , while its baseline appropriation on an inflation-adjusted basis has decreased by nearly 20 percent.
This imbalance has left the IRS without enough resources to meet taxpayer needs, let alone to invest in additional personnel and technology.
The IRS has not finished processing millions of original and amended returns from , even though returns will soon arrive for processing.
According to the Department of the Treasury, the gross tax gap — the difference between taxes paid and taxes owed — is estimated to have totaled about $580 billion in , up from an estimated amount of nearly $440 billion in , and is expected to rise to about $7 trillion by if left unaddressed.
Processing a paper-filed return is significantly more expensive for the IRS than processing an e-filed return due to the costs associated with training, recruiting, and staffing for manual data transcription.
In fact, the cost to process a paper-filed Form 1040 in was $15.21, which is substantially higher than the $0.36 cost to process an e-filed return.
The report also included some totals for levies, liens, and seizures, so I can update these graphs:
More excitement from the human war on traffic ticket robot cameras, as fire, spray paint, and other sorts of sabotage knocked cameras out of commission in France, Germany, and Italy in recent weeks.
Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:
At the NWTRCC blog, tax resister William E. Ruhaak shared his experience trying to get the government to acknowledge his carefully-drafted, personal “statement of conscience.”
He fought a determined pro se legal battle to get the U.S. Tax Court to admit his statement of conscience as evidence in his tax appeal.
He believes such a struggle is important in order to defend “The fundamental human right to publicly express an opinion or belief.
And also the right to have a written expression of that belief included in government documentation for future reference.”
The Court eventually gave in and added his statement as a piece of evidence, but seemingly only to humor him.
The ruling in his case reads in part:
We nevertheless admonish petitioner that instituting future proceedings before the Tax Court for the purpose of advancing frivolous arguments relating to his conscientious objection to the payment of Federal taxes is likely to result in the imposition of a significant section 6673 penalty against him.
We recognized four decades ago that “there has been a long and undeviating parade of cases in this and other courts” rejecting the arguments of conscientious objectors who sought to avoid paying “the part of their taxes which they estimated to be attributable to military expenditures and to which they objected because of their religious, moral, and ethical objections to war and because of their claimed ‘rights’ under various constitutional provisions, the Nuremberg Principles, international law, and numerous international agreements and treaties.”
Greenberg v. Commissioner, 73 T.C. 806, 810 ().
At this late date, the Court will not condone the continued assertion of similar frivolous positions in meritless litigation that wastes both its own limited resources and those of the IRS.
The War Resisters League has released its annual “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart fliers, based on the Biden Administration’s proposed budget for .
As Pentagon spending continues to rise, and yet more millions are being spent to arm Ukraine, pie chart aficionados may be surprised to see that the military-spending slice of the pie chart seems to have noticibly shrunk this year.
Ed Hedemann and Ruth Benn, who do the research and composition for the pie chart, explain why.
In part, the reason is that they are operating on the proposed budget, not whatever budget (and supplementary appropriations) Congress will eventually, tardily enact.
The Biden Administration’s proposed budget is chockablock with a wish list of non-military spending that Congress will probably not enact.
The absolute amount of military spending has risen substantially, but relatively it looks smaller because of all that extra wish list spending.
The latest NWTRCC newsletter is out, with a preview of the upcoming tax filing season and other news from the American war tax resistance scene.
The only thing that comes close to the problems we’re seeing now at the Internal Revenue Service was in 1985, when the agency was rolling out some new technology—technology it’s still using today.
Back then, the processing centers got so behind on their work that employees started hiding tax returns in closets and putting them in bags in the trash.
Now it’s way worse, with the IRS, for the second year in a row, entering the filing season with a backlog of millions of not yet processed returns and pieces of correspondence.
The current National Taxpayer Advocate released an amusing blog post about how pathetic and outdated the IRS processes for handling tax returns are. Excerpts:
When I released my annual report in , I said that paper is the IRS’s Kryptonite and the IRS is buried in it.
The reason paper returns are so challenging is that the IRS still has not implemented technology to machine read them, so each digit on every paper return must be manually keystroked into IRS systems by an employee.
The IRS has announced that it plans to hire thousands of new workers to try to deal with its paperwork backlog.
But, in a tight labor market, and unable to offer competitive pay rates to compensate for the soul-crushing tedium ($15.61/hour anyone?), they’re finding it a challenge to turn those plans into personnel.
The Washington Post took a look at a recent job fair the agency held.
IRS employees don’t follow the rules on paid time-off, with a suspicious pattern of sick leave days allowing employees to make their own three-day weekends and extended holidays.
Catalan separatist group / government-in-exile Council for the Republic is promoting a tax redirection campaign in which Catalan citizens withhold the portion of their taxes that would go to the Spanish monarchy or to its repression apparatus, and give that money instead to Front Republicà d’Acció Solidària or some such group working for Catalan independence.
Doomed, quixotic, gonzo tax resister John McAfee is trying to get in the last word by means of a set of interviews he gave when he was on the run from the law.
In them, he explains why he stopped paying. Excerpts:
I’d just had enough.
I’d paid $50 million in income tax over the years.
I thought that was plenty.
I hadn’t paid tax since I went to Belize, but technically, as an American citizen, even if you’re not living in the country, using the services and driving on the roads, you still have to file and pay 30% of your income to the United States.
The only two countries in the world that enforce that rule are the United States and Eritrea!
How [frigging] bizarre is that?
Anyway, I just said, “I’m sorry.
This is insane.
I’m not doing this anymore.”
[I]n America, income tax is in fact unconstitutional anyway.
It was only ever created to fund the war effort in , but that edict, like many others, was never extinguished after the need for it ceased to exist.
I was telling people that I thought taxes were illegal, and if they also felt that they were illegal and/or unjust they should just stop paying, too.
Not just that, I was showing them how to do it without getting caught.
I stumbled somehow on the No Obligation Challenge website.
It looks like a U.K. version of the familiar U.S. tax protester song-and-dance (“Did you know there is no law obligating you to pay council tax?”) but I was impressed by the quality of the graphic design and layout of the website, which is head and shoulders above what I usually see from that segment of the fringe.
