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War Resisters International
War Resisters’ International, which is based in London, reports that Inland Revenue is threatening to seize assets from the organization because it has been withholding 7% of its employees’ income taxes (equivalent to its estimate of the percentage of the British government budget that goes to war) since the tax year.
An update on the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign.
This is an alternative fund to which war tax resisters can redirect their taxes.
It has a national focus and so is an alternative to the various regional alternative funds.
In the modern world, many governments have introduced income tax withholding
or “pay as you earn.” In such a scheme, it can be difficult for people to
resist paying income tax, as the tax has already been paid on their behalf by
their employers. In such cases, resisters need their employers to be willing
to go out on a limb and resist alongside them.
Today I’ll give some examples of employers who helped their employees resist
income tax withholding.
Quaker Meetings
Quaker Meetings (congregations and collections of congregations) have sometimes
supported the war tax resistance of their employees by not withholding taxes
from their paychecks.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Yearly
Meeting) has discerned and again affirms that conscientious objection to
paying taxes supporting military purposes is an appropriate and traditional
individual expression of the Friends Peace Testimony. As a result, Yearly
Meeting has a religious duty to refrain from taking action that violates an
employee’s expression of conscience in such historic Friends testimonies. …
At the written request of an employee pursuant to this Policy, Yearly Meeting
will withhold from an employee’s gross salary or wages, but refuse to forward
to IRS,
amounts up to but not in excess of the military portion of the federal income
tax otherwise due on that employee’s pay. Yearly Meeting, in notifying
IRS
that it has not remitted a portion of withheld taxes, will disclose and advise
IRS of
its action, as described [below]…
Yearly Meeting will communicate at least annually with an appropriate office
or official of the
IRS to
explain that, pursuant to this Policy and Yearly Meeting’s core religious
principles, it has withheld the full amount of taxes, as indicated by form(s)
W-4, from the salaries of certain employees opposed to the payment of taxes
for military purposes. Yearly Meeting will further explain that, at the
request of each such employee, it has not remitted the portion of the amount
withheld which the employee has conscientiously refused to pay, that it has
identified the amounts not remitted in its records, and that the amounts not
remitted, plus interest, will be paid over to the Treasury of the United
States on behalf of the employees at such time as there is assurance that the
taxes will not be used for military purposes.
The Meeting was taken to court in
for failing to remit $11,224 in taxes
from resisting employees. More recently, the Meeting has been pursuing legal
arguments in support of its employee Priscilla Adams, who has been resisting
war taxes for years with the help of the Meeting. The Meeting was unable to
convince a court to order the
IRS to
respect its conscientious scruples, and the agency ordered to Meeting to
garnishee Adams’s salary. The Meeting has continued to refuse.
The London Yearly Meeting for a while withheld a portion of the
pay-as-you-earn withholding of some of its employees, hoping to make this a
test case that might legalize conscientious objection to military taxation.
The courts rejected their arguments, and an appeal to the European Commission
of Human Rights also failed, and so the Meeting stopped trying to resist
military taxation and now gives war tax resistance only rhetorical support:
Since losing the appeal we have paid in full the income tax collected from
our employees. In recent months we have considered whether we can continue to
do this, but after very careful consideration have decided that for the time
being we must do so. The acceptance of the rule of law is part of our
witness, … for a just and peaceful world cannot come about without this.
However we do wish to make it clear that we object to the way in which the
PAYE [withholding]
system involves us in a process of collecting money, used in part to pay for
military activity and war preparations, which takes away from the individual
taxpayer the right to express their own conscientious objection. This
involvement is incompatible with our work for peace.
American Friends Service Committee
During the Vietnam War, the American Friends Service Committee refused to
withhold taxes from those of its employees who were refusing to pay taxes.
Milton Mayer said, of the Committee’s action:
Under withholding, most of the people who don’t want to buy Mylai have
already had it bought for them by April 15. … A few religious
organizations — not the churches, of course — have refused to withhold the
tax from the pay of their employes who do not want to buy Mylai. The most
respectable of them is the American Friends Service Committee, with which I
confess to being associated. … But the AFSC
has a task force of eighty Philadelphia lawyers, and one of these years a
test case will go to Washington. Meanwhile, however, the conscientious
citizen who waits for a test case will go on buying Mylai until the whole of
Vietnam is a ditch.
The AFSC continues to support tax-resisting employees, and has had mixed luck defending itself in court.
According to the NWTRCC pamphlet on Organizational War Tax Resistance:
Employers or other entities which refuse to withhold from the assets of a war
tax resister on religious grounds actually have a chance of justifying their
actions in court thanks to a case involving
the American Friends Service Committee
(AFSC) and the
IRS. A
federal district court ruled that the
AFSC and
its employees had the First Amendment right not to be required to participate
in the withholding system, since the
IRS has
other methods of satisfying its objectives, such as levies. The decision was
overturned by the Supreme Court, but solely on procedural grounds. This
position is possibly strengthened by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
(RFRA), passed by Congress in .
The IRS
has more recently tried to send what are called “lock-in letters” to the
AFSC, demanding that they withhold taxes from their resisting employees at
the maximum rate permissible by law.
For a time (and this may still be the case), the AFSC policy was to obey
such withholding laws and orders, but to hold back a percentage of the
withheld taxes from the government, putting that percentage (a percentage they
deemed equal to the percentage of the federal budget spent on the military)
into an escrow account.
According to a Treasury Inspector General
for Tax Administration report, many employers ignore these lock-in letters.
This takes some gumption. The way the law works, if an employer doesn’t comply
with the lock-in letter, the employer can become liable for the taxes
that the employee isn’t paying.
Mennonite General Assembly
In 1989, the Mennonite Church General Assembly adopted a resolution to
“support the Mennonite General Board in establishing a policy that federal
income taxes not be withheld from the wages of any of its employees who make
this request because of conscientious objection to the use of their taxes for
military purposes.”
The General Board, however, balked on establishing such a policy after
determining “there was not enough support… to ask church boards to engage in
civil disobedience.”
Restored Israel of Yahweh
The small Jehovah’s Witnesses spin-off group called the Restored Israel of
Yahweh practices war tax resistance. To help facilitate this, two of them, who
ran a construction business, agreed not to withhold taxes from those of their
employees who were also members of that denomination.
Those two, along with the company’s bookkeeper, were taken to court and
convicted of tax evasion charges, making them, according to one of their
lawyers, “the first pacifist tax resisters to be prosecuted and
jailed — possibly ever — for felony conspiracy to defraud the
U.S. and attempted
tax evasion, the most serious criminal charges in the Internal Revenue Code.”
War Resisters League & War Resisters International
In , Ralph DiGia, who was working for the War
Resisters League, asked them to stop withholding federal taxes from his
paycheck. The League agreed, and some other employees followed DiGia’s lead.
It had taken a lot of work to get the League to adopt a policy of tax refusal.
At first, they had refused, with a member of the League’s executive committee
saying “the life of the organization is at stake.” War tax resisters
responded, saying: “If pacifist organizations, whose business is to create a
warless world, are not ready to risk something for war resistance
now, when will they be ready?” Another group, the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, also refused to challenge the
IRS, and
some of its employees resigned over the issue.
War Resisters’ International, which is based in London, decided in
to hold back a percentage of
its employees’s taxes (equivalent, in its view, to the military percentage
of the British national budget). The organization takes the position that
conscientious objection to military taxation is an unrecognized human right,
but a human right all the same, and they intend to assert it.
Collective Impressions
American war tax resister Ed Guinan for a time ran a print shop called
“Collective Impressions.” “Most of the workers in the collective were rooted
in a Catholic tradition of pacifism,” said Guinan, and so,
the company paid its
employees’ withholding not to the Internal Revenue Service but directly to the
U.S. Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency.
The Agency returned the money, saying it could not accept it under such
circumstances, whereupon Collective Impressions put the money into an escrow
account from which it hoped to eventually be able to pay the money in a way
that wouldn’t violate the pacifist beliefs of its employees, and from where
it was eventually seized by the government.
Straight Lines, Ltd.
Martin Philips, director of the Welsh jewelry business “Straight Lines”
stopped paying the 13.6% pay-as-you-earn withholding to the government for his
employees — sending the money instead to the Overseas Development
Administration as a protest against government military spending.
The government took Straight Lines to court, and eventually seized money from
the company to cover the unpaid taxes.
Vivien Kellems
Soon after income tax withholding was introduced in the United States,
ornery industrialist Vivien Kellems decided she was not interested in being
the tax collector for her employees’ at the Kellems Cable Grip Manufacturing
Company:
The most un-American phrase in our modern vocabulary is “take home pay.” What
do we mean, “take home pay”? When I hire a man to work for me we discuss
three things: the job to be done, the hours he shall work, and the wages he
shall receive. And on Friday when he received that pay envelope, we have both
fulfilled our contract for that week. There is no further obligation on
either side. The money in that envelope belongs to him. He has worked for it
and he has earned it. No one, not even the United States Government, has the
right to touch it. Who dares to lay profane hands upon that money, to rudely
filch from that free man the fruits of his labor, even before the money is in
his own hands. This is a monstrous invasion of the rights of a free people
and an outrageous perversion of the spirit of the Constitution. This is the
miserable system foisted upon the people of our country by New Deal zealots
and arrogant Communists who have wormed themselves into high places in
Washington. This system is deliberately designed to make involuntary tax
collectors of every employer and to impose involuntary tax servitude upon
every employee. We don’t need to go to Russia for slavery, we’ve got it right
here.
Paying taxes is a duty, a responsibility and a privilege of citizenship.
Without taxes we can have no government. However I do not exercise other
duties, responsibilities and privileges of citizenship for my employees. I do
not vote for them, I do not form political opinions for them, I do not select
a church for them, I do not pay real estate taxes for them. They are all free
American citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and
responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am
not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.
To demonstrate that she wasn’t against her employees paying their taxes, but
only opposed to having to do it for them, she organized her employees once per
quarter and allowed them, on company time, to fill out their own tax returns
and to go down to the post office as a group to purchase money orders and file
their own taxes.
The government subjected Kellems to a public smear campaign (which included
intercepting and publicizing her love letters), and to legal action. The
government won the legal battle, fining Kellems $7,600, whereupon she resumed
withholding taxes from her employees’ paychecks.
George Fidenato
George Fidenato is Vivien Kellems reincarnated in today’s Italy.
he has been refusing to withhold
taxes from his six employees’ paychecks. “I do not want to be the tax
collector. I’m not a slave of the state, and wouldn’t want to work for it even
if you paid me!” As of this writing he is still pursuing legal appeals.
Indianapolis Baptist Temple
The Indianapolis Baptist Temple started refusing to pay federal taxes in
, when pastor Gregory Dixon “decided the
church would break all ties with the government and no longer act as its agent
in withholding taxes from its employees,” citing Constitutional freedom of
religion as his mandate for taking his church out from under Uncle Sam’s
thumb. For several years, nothing came of this defiance, but in
, the
IRS
started seeking back taxes, eventually filing liens against the church and
against Dixon. The church fought back in court, but lost a series of appeals,
finally getting turned down by the
U.S. Supreme Court
in , whereupon the government seized
and auctioned off church property and Dixon himself was fined.
“Texas housewives”
, a group of women the
press invariably referred to as the “Texas housewives” refused to withhold and
pay social security taxes on the wages of their household help. The women were
opposed to government-run social security, and to being enlisted as government
tax collectors. They claimed also to be supported in their stand by their
employees.
Money was eventually seized from their bank accounts to cover the taxes. They
also pursued court appeals to try to get the tax declared unconstitutional,
but in they lost their case and began paying
the taxes.
The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom
The National Insurance Act of required all
workers to pay a portion of their paycheck into a fund for government-run
health and unemployment benefits.
Members of the women’s suffrage movement saw this as another tax enacted
without their consent, another example of “taxation without representation,”
and another opportunity to resist.
Some members of suffrage groups were employers, and some suffrage groups had
paid employees. In the Women
Writers’ Suffrage League met to ask whether they “should, as a society, resist
the new insurance tax and refuse to insure their secretary, with her full
consent to their so doing?”
Kate Harvey refused to pay 5 shillings, 10 pence of tax for her gardener — for
which she was sentenced to two months in prison.
The Women’s Freedom League refused to pay the tax on their employees — “we
refuse to acquiesce in any legislation which controls the resources of women
without the consent of women” — but the government seemed unwilling or unable
to do more than threaten the group.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
According to a post on their website, War Resisters’ International plans to go to the tax agency in London today and pay the last five years of taxes that they have been withholding.
They say they will do so “under protest” and they invite like-minded people to demonstrate with them.
(I think I’d rather watch a bunch of vegetarian activists eat hamburgers “under protest” myself.)
According to a press release, the organization had its back to the wall, with the tax agency threatening to come to “confiscate computers, printers and other equipment that will make it impossible [for WRI] to continue working.”
They opted to pay rather than remain vulnerable to this property seizure.
The Greek government has indicted several activists whom it accuses of having been part of the toll gate raids.
In response, the “Won’t Pay” movement stormed three toll gates on , opening the gates for free passage, and handing the passing drivers leaflets describing the anti-toll movement.
Another town in Catalonia, Alella, has begun refusing to forward its municipal taxes to the Spanish central government and is instead paying the money to the Taxation Agency of Catalonia, as part of a spreading Catalan nationalist tax resistance movement.
(Més)
If you missed the conference call with Cindy Sheehan, Ruth Benn, Ed Hedemann and three other war tax resisters talking shop, you can hear a recording here.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has an update on tax fraud perpetrated by U.S. prisoners, an industry that has been growing in recent years.
In , prisoners filed at least 91,434 tax returns that claimed $757,600,000 in refunds that they did not legally qualify for.
The IRS caught most of this in time, but still issued $35,200,000 in refunds they wish they hadn’t.
Some new links of interest to war tax resisters in particular:
The next national gathering of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee will be held in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia).
Check this page for details.
The Greek government has indicted several activists whom it accuses of having been part of the toll gate raids.
In response, 
