How you can resist funding the government → about the IRS and U.S. tax law/policy → IRS incompetence → enforcement effort/results → criminal prosecutions

The new issue of More Than a Paycheck, NWTRCC’s newsletter, is on-line. Among the news you’ll find there:

• Talking Taxes and Taking Action Against Military Spending — how activists are using “penny polls” to start a conversation about government spending priorities
• Counseling Notes — how tax resisters can avoid getting preyed upon by “settle with the IRS for pennies on the dollar” companies; more “frivolous filing” overreach from the IRS; and increased use of IRS enforcement tactics isn’t leading to increased tax revenue
• Many Thanks — to the generous donors who keep NWTRCC in business
• Criminal Cases and Fear — Karl Meyer writes from the standpoint of decades of experience with war tax resistance about what factors increase the likelihood of criminal prosecution for war tax resistance. Larry Dansinger and Ruth Benn add two cents apiece.
• War Tax Resisters in History — Ed Hedemann reviews some of his research into the U.S. government’s use of property seizures and criminal cases as tools against war tax resisters in the post-World War Ⅱ era
• War Tax Resistance Ideas & Actions — Evan Reeves tries a new way of paying-as-a-protest; a look at the Quaker “Movement of Conscience” project; a review of Muriel T. Stackley’s War is a God that Demands Human Sacrifice; honoring peacemakers Martha Graber and Fern Goering; upcoming events at which NWTRCC will have a presence; and a look at the new $10.40 For Peace project, another attempt to ease peace activists into war tax resistance.
• Resources — notes on the Death & Taxes DVD, the new “Thoreau and His Heirs: The History and the Legacy of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience” study kit, and the NWTRCC fundraising scarves
• NWTRCC News — a note on the upcoming national conference in Boston next month
• a Profile of war tax resister Heather Snow

While most of what I hear about the IRS these days makes them out to be struggling to keep on top of an increasing workload with fewer employees and a shrinking budget, there’s one curious outlying data point: criminal prosecutions of tax cases referred by the IRS to the Justice Department are up 23.4% during the Obama administration.

This may not be as anomalous as it seems. Perhaps by chucking these cases over the fence into the criminal court system, this takes some of the workload off of the IRS. In other words, maybe these cases are ones the agency would prefer to handle with civil charges and it’s pursuing criminal charges only because otherwise it couldn’t handle the case load at all. Just speculation; I’m not sure if the budget even works that way.

Another possibility is that the surge in identity theft cases in recent years has led to more criminal activity that falls under the tax umbrella. (The report shows that charges of theft of public money and of identity fraud were the third and ninth most common criminal tax charges in 2013 — up from 15^th and 19^th respectively the year before.)

The IRS Criminal Investigation division recently released its annual report.

Here’s the Orwellian happy face the Commissioner of the IRS (Charles Rettig) puts on the group:

“CI supports the efforts of compliant taxpayers by visibly demonstrating the risks of noncompliance thereby helping otherwise honest taxpayers stay honest and compliant.”

The report is mostly a glossy rah-rah yearbook featuring group photos of the inevitably “dedicated” workers at its field offices around the country and brief narratives of some of the more celebrated take-downs (e.g. “Members of Fraudulent Jamaican Sweepstakes Ring Sentenced”).

As with most of the rest of the IRS, the Criminal Investigations division has had to do more with less in recent years. Budgets and staff have dropped, while responsibilities (such as Obamacare enforcement, figuring out how bitcoin works, and combatting increasingly organized and international identity theft and refund fraud) have grown.

The report breaks down the numbers of investigations, prosecutions, and convictions resulting from Criminal Investigations work. It’s surprising just how few federal criminal prosecutions for tax matters there are, given the scope of the agency’s bailiwick and the amount of tax law flouting out there. For example, there are probably tens of millions of American taxpayers (individuals and businesses) who simply do not file tax returns at all in any given year. Of those, the criminal investigations division investigated 271, recommended 128 for prosecution, and managed to bring down the hammer of justice on 111 this year.

They don’t even report numbers for people like me who file but refuse to pay. There is such a thing as a failure-to-pay crime, but it’s rarely prosecuted.

Adding up all of the Criminal Investigations activity over the past few years, which includes everything from Bank Secrecy Act violations to Narcotics to Terrorism to Money Laundering to scofflaws like me, you get this story of continuing decline: