How you can resist funding the government →
the tax resistance movement →
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Fall 2015 NWTRCC national in Las Vegas, Nevada
The 30th Annual New England Regional Gathering of War Tax Resisters and Supporters will be held in Amherst, Massachusetts.
The conference will focus on “strategizing new directions for war tax
resistance,” and features a Friday evening presentation by Frida Berrigan. The
gathering is open to the public. If you’d like more information, ask
Jason Rawn or
Daniel Sicken.
The following month, , the national gathering of NWTRCC will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada.
More details and registration information will become available on this page.
Today, some links about domestic tax and tax resistance issues:
This coming tax season, “shared responsibility” fines for people without qualifying health insurance are going to hit for realsies.
The IRS is by law somewhat hobbled in pursuing people who refuse to pay these fines, and when you combine that with conservative hostility toward Obamacare, you have a recipe for a potential wave of tax resistance.
It looks like the experiment of using private bill collectors to go after unpaid federal taxes is back.
It seems this on-again/off-again experiment has little to do with collecting taxes, and more to do with a tug-of-war between Democrats and Republicans on whether to reward Democrat-leaning public employee unions or Republican-leaning government contractors.
Irwin Schiff, one of the most bull-headed and influential of the “show-me-the-law”-style tax protesters in the United States in recent years, died in prison recently.
He developed cancer while in prison, and died shackled to a prison hospital bed, as his son Peter recounts:
As the cancer consumed him, his voice changed and the prison phone system no longer recognized it, so he could not even talk with family members on the phone during his final month of life.
When his condition deteriorated to the point where he needed to be hospitalized, government employees blindly followed orders that kept him shackled to his bed.
This despite the fact that escape was impossible for an 87 year old terminally ill, legally blind patient who could barely breathe, let alone walk.
Some news of interest to tax resisters in the U.S.:
The on-again/off-again boondoggle of the federal government contracting out to private debt collection agencies to pursue people behind on their taxes is apparently back on again.
By including the program in a new transportation bill, its proponents could use the income they hope to see from the program to offset other spending.
It would probably be more efficient for the government just to hire more IRS agents to go after the money, but there are few things a Republican Congress would be less likely to do than give the IRS more money to increase the ranks of the National Treasury Employees Union.
My guess is that these private debt collectors are going to have a hell of a time.
Since the last time this sort of plan was floated, a massive, years-long, ongoing, coast-to-coast scam has been in progress in which callers impersonating tax collectors have been getting victims to pony up money.
News reports follow in the wake of the heists, all saying that if someone calls you up about a supposed tax debt, it’s a scam.
The private agencies are gonna have a hell of a time distinguishing themselves from the scammers.
If the program is like the last one (and I haven’t seen the details yet, so I’m not sure), the agencies will be able to keep 25% of what they collect for themselves.
It’s small consolation, but some consolation, to know that at least some of the money won’t be going directly to the government.
In more troubling news, another part of the same Transportation bill would revoke passports from people who are behind on their taxes by more than $50,000.
I’ll probably hit the $50k mark in a couple of years, so I take this very personally.
The bill hasn’t become law just yet.
They’re still ironing out the differences between the House and Senate versions.
But both houses’ versions had both of these proposals, so they seem likely to survive (though it’s not unheard of for parts of legislation that are passed by each house to wind up on the cutting room floor regardless, whatever you may have heard on Schoolhouse Rock).
Obama is expected to sign the bill into law either way.
When the final bill is passed and signed I’ll take another look and investigate what the process of passport denial/revocation might actually look like in practice.
And I’ll of course post something here if my own passport gets yanked.
I may even accept that as a challenge and see if I can row a boat to Cuba or wade across the Rio Grande.
Counseling Notes, including an early warning on those transportation bill provisions, news that the IRS will no longer levy SSA disability insurance benefits, notes on what happens when the IRS disputes the numbers on your W-4 form, and what happens when the IRS sends a notice to an address you no longer live at.
