How you can resist funding the government → about the IRS and U.S. tax law/policy → IRS incompetence → miscellaneous blundering

The IRS is puffing up its institutional chest and engaging in the annual ritual of declaring that it’s going to get tough on tax cheaters this year. Over the last few years, there’s been a 50% increase in the number of people surveyed by the IRS Oversight Board who say that cheating on your taxes isn’t wrong.

The IRS hopes that by sounding tough, it’ll discourage tax cheats. People who play it straight on their tax forms are increasingly reporting that it’s not the value of honesty that motivates them, but the fear of audits. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, however:

Criminal enforcement of the nation’s tax laws by the IRS has plummeted to an all time low… Tax prosecutions brought as a result of IRS investigations currently are running at about half of what they were only ten years ago… This sharp decline has continued at the same time that the nation has been swept by a flood of reports about corporate crime studded with such names as Enron, Arthur Anderson, WorldCom, Adelphi Communications and Health South.

IRS-prompted tax prosecutions, non-tax-related prosecutions also investigated by the IRS, administrative penalties assessed by the IRS out of court, and civil suits filed by the IRS — all of these are down dramatically over the past decade. A year ago, the IRS commissioner reported “a huge gap between the number of taxpayers whom the IRS knows are not filing, not reporting or not paying what they owe and our capacity to require them to comply.”

The IRS reports that 30,000 estimated tax payments (1040ES) were dumped into San Francisco bay when the courier delivering them got into an accident on the San Mateo bridge.

Gotta love bureaucracy. The Taxpayer Advocacy Panel (which “listens to taxpayers, identifies taxpayers’ issues, and makes suggestions for improving IRS service and customer satisfaction”) just released their latest report, containing dozens of recommendations. I only skimmed, but for some reason recommendation #TAP A04-072 caught my eye:

Many taxpayers and even some experienced practitioners are confused by the reference to the Earned Income Tax Credit in some documents as “Earned Income Tax Credit” (“EITC”) and the use in other documents of the term “Earned Income Credit” (“EIC”).

The Committee recommended that the EITC program work with other IRS organizations to agree upon and implement consistent use of either “Earned Income Tax Credit” (“EITC”) or “Earned Income Credit” (“EIC”).

Earned Income Tax Credit Director David R. Williams responded:

EITC Director advised Committee that the recommendation was not politically feasible.

I laughed out loud.

Another tidbit gives tax resisters a quantitative peek at how much trouble they cause the IRS when they resist token amounts. This comes as part of TAP 04-037, a recommendation that the IRS computers be instructed not to bother to pursue balances smaller than $25 (currently the cut-off is $5):

A cost analysis of IRS Balance Due Notices showed the cost of a single notice ranges from $0.45 to $4.79, depending on the type of notice and whether it is reviewed by the notice Review function prior to issuance. Although the cost of administering a tax module through a cycle of several notices is significantly higher.

A few miscellaneous things that caught my eye recently:

• Ask the Advisor has a good run-down of retirement plan options for the self-employed. It gives the rundown of Simplified Employee Pensions, Keough Plans, Roth and Spousal IRAs, and another variety of account I only learned about recently: the “solo 401(k)” — here’s where I first learned about those.
• Those of you who enjoyed the flashback to the Yugoslav genocide of the 1990s that I treated you to during my recent review of Evil and Human Agency may be interested to know that Serbian vampire hunters drove a three-foot-long wooden stake through the heart of the corpse of Slobodan Milosevic in order to prevent him from returning to life and haunting the country.
• Among the IRS’s many tangential tasks is terrorist-hunting. That is, they use “a manual process and a limited terrorist watch list to identify instances in which charitable and other nonprofit organizations may be linked to individuals and/or entities whose assets have been frozen because they have committed or pose a significant risk of committing acts of terrorism.” The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration checked in to see how well this was going. Not too well, as it turns out. They haven’t spotted a terrorist yet, though their methods seem sound: Max Baucus, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, notes that “IRS personnel told TIGTA that they primarily look for ‘Middle Eastern sounding names’ when considering which tax filings to flag for further review.”
• Speaking of names worthy of further review, a few more details have leaked about the revoltingly cozy relationship between the Blairs & Bushes of the world and their counterparts in the Saudi monarchy. In short: “$100 billion a year flows into Saudi Arabia’s coffers to pay for their oil. The US and UK make sure that, rather than the money staying there and being spent for the people of Saudi Arabia, it returns to us to pay for weapons Saudi Arabia doesn’t need. To make this happen, arms dealers bribe the Saudi royal family with hundreds of millions of dollars, all with the knowledge and approval of the British government.”
• “In the first 4½ months of 2007, American aircraft dropped 237 bombs and missiles in support of ground forces in Iraq, already surpassing the 229 expended in all of 2006, according to U.S. Air Force figures obtained by The Associated Press.”
• Meanwhile… “[P]residential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at present, competing with each other in their calls for the expansion of the Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 troops, mostly for the Army and the Marines.… This atop a military that has already grown to gargantuan levels, and is spending like there’s no tomorrow (which strikes me as one of those self-fulfilling prophecies):

  How astonishing are the budgetary numbers? Consider the trajectory of U.S. defense spending over the last nearly two decades. From the end of the Cold War into the mid-1990s, defense spending actually fell significantly. In constant 1996 dollars, the Pentagon’s budget dropped from a peacetime high of $376 billion, at the end of President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup in 1989, to a low of $265 billion in 1996. (That compares to post-World War Ⅱ wartime highs of $437 billion in 1953, during the Korean War, and $388 billion in 1968, at the peak of the War in Vietnam.) After the Soviet empire peacefully disintegrated, the 1990s decline wasn’t exactly the hoped-for “peace dividend,” but it wasn’t peanuts either.

  However, since September 12^th, 2001, defense spending has simply exploded. For 2008, the Bush administration is requesting a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001. Even subtracting the costs of the ongoing “Global War on Terrorism” — which is what the White House likes to call its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — for FY 2008, the Pentagon will still spend $510 billion. In other words, even without the President’s two wars, defense spending will have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s.

The IRS has a thing or two to learn about computer security, according to a recent TIGTA audit:

TIGTA scanned IRS networks and determined that 11 percent of the approximately 1,900 databases scanned had 1 or more installation accounts with a default or blank password. A total of 369 installation accounts had default or blank passwords; 26 contained powerful database administrator privileges.…

Databases found with default or blank passwords during our scans include those that contain personally identifiable tax information. Malicious users can exploit accounts with default or blank passwords to steal taxpayer identities and carry out fraud schemes.

A majority of the IRS databases scanned do not have the latest software updates (patches) installed; 65 percent of the databases scanned needed to be updated, with more than 300 databases being outdated from 11 months to 20 months. As a result, outdated IRS databases were collectively susceptible to nearly 40,000 database vulnerabilities, one-half of which are considered high risk. These vulnerabilities include those used for common penetration attacks.

Tax Day reports and media mentions of war tax resistance are coming in from across the country:

• Members of the War Resisters League carried a War Tax Boycott banner through midtown Manhattan.
• Peace activists in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, held a penny poll outside the Federal Building.
• Tax resister Jon Klein is profiled in Richmond, Virginia’s Style Weekly.
• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC was interviewed on Rob Lorei’s Radioactivity show. (Benn’s interview starts at 9:27)
  
• Paul Guggenheimer’s Dakota Midday radio show talked to a Tea Party promoter and to Lincoln Rice of NWTRCC about their Tax Day plans.
• Jesse Watson and Lew McGregor greeted last-minute filers in Rockland, Maine to let people know that there are alternatives to paying for war.
• Don Timmerman tells readers of the Superior [Wisconsin] Telegram why he and his wife resist their taxes.
• NWTRCC is publishing reports on local Tax Day actions as they come in.

And in other news:

• David Boaz of Cato @ Liberty calls for a campaign to unite the anti-tax and anti-war movements under a single “Stop the War, Stop the Spending” banner.
• Al Giordano looks at the “Tea Party” protests and compares them to Wally Nelson’s war tax resistance protests he used to cover as a reporter every April 15^th.
• Kathy Belge at Kathy’s Lesbian Life Blog writes about tax resistance for gay and lesbian couples.
• Brad Spangler of the Center for a Stateless Society gives the anarchist perspective on Tax Day with his audio op-ed “Taxation is Theft”.
• Christopher Beam, Slate’s “Explainer,” explains what happens if you don’t file your taxes:

  Probably nothing. If you’re self-employed without any major assets or loans, the odds of getting busted are extremely low. In fact, an estimated 7 million Americans fail to file their taxes every year, and in 2008 the IRS examined only 158,000 such cases. That comes out to a roughly 2 percent chance of getting caught. Even if the IRS does audit you, the agency probably won’t press charges. Instead, they’ll just file a tax return for you and charge you a fee for the trouble.

• When Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took the reins at the IRS despite having neglected to pay $34,000 in his own taxes, a lot of people were miffed at the hypocrisy. But none had more cause than IRS employees themselves, who are saddled with strict, zero-tolerance policies against tax evasion that can cost them their jobs. And:

  IRS employees have reported that taxpayers are occasionally citing the Geithner case when they are asked to pay their tax bills. “It’s making the compliance conversation harder,” [Colleen] Kelley [of the National Treasury Employees Union] said.

• “An ABC News investigation has uncovered case after case of checks being stolen, manipulated and cashed by [IRS] contract employees responsible for processing them, resulting in delayed payments and heavily disrupted lives.”
• A Charles Adams speech about “Tax Resistance, Then and Now” was featured on The Lew Rockwell Show.
• Thomas L. Knapp reads the tea leaves and finds some hopeful signs over at the Center for a Stateless Society.
• Christofer, from Chicago’s Kairos community, reflects on his tax resistance and what it means.
• Conservative columnist Ross Douthat shares his impressions of the Tea Party phenomenon and compares it to the anti-war protests in the Dubya years. He concludes: “here we are in the sixth year of the Iraq War, and all those anti-war protests, their excesses and stupidities notwithstanding, look a lot more prescient in hindsight than they did (to me, at least) when they were going on. So if you’re inclined to sneer and giggle at the Tea Parties, keep in mind that just because a group of protesters looks ragged, resentful, and naive, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong to be alarmed.”
• Finally, Joe the Plumber appears to be following the Paris Hilton model of celebrity descent. The latest station on his trainwreck has him urging people to call a 1‒900 number to “vote” to abolish the IRS and replace it with the “fair tax” (a national sales tax) thus endorsing two scams for the credulous at once.

Connie Neal is so engaged with her work for the IRS that she bursts into song frequently

Agent Greg Leong demonstrates the wireless cellular telephone that is his team’s part of the IRS technology portfolio

The IRS recently released their 2009–2013 Strategic Plan. It’s full of vague bureaucracy-speak rah-rah about how in order to “proactively identify and promptly address” problems, they’re going to “build and employ just-in-time capabilities” and “strengthen partnerships” and “enhance coordination” and “streamline processes” and “leverage research” and “expand employee knowledge and awareness” and “develop deep expertise and capabilities” and “capture efficiencies” and “continually monitor the technology portfolio” and “increase employee engagement” and so forth.

There’s really nothing there. You should check it out, though, just to make fun of the employee photos they decorated it with.

Some bits-and-pieces from here-and-there:

• Not all tax resistance has to do with grand global issues or conscientious objection; some is just the protest of people who feel they’re getting shafted by a government that takes too much and provides too little. Case in point: Scott Frisby of Southend. He says the government has failed to provide even the minimum of services, and so he’s dropping his subscription (or at least 25% of it). Scroll down to the bottom to read the hilarious response from Southend Council’s customer service department.
• The Indianapolis Baptist Temple started refusing to pay federal taxes in 1983, 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 early 1990s, 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 2001. Here’s the story, with links to the court opinions.
• War Resisters’ International has released their Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns for free, on-line.
• A populist form of tax resistance is aimed at speed and red-light cameras that scan license plates of offending vehicles, snap photos of the drivers, and automatically issue traffic tickets. These cameras are more a revenue-raising program than a safety-encouraging one, and they’re causing lots of resentment.

  A driver has racked up dozens of speeding tickets in photo-radar zones on Phoenix-area freeways while sporting monkey and giraffe masks, and is fighting every one by claiming the costumes make it impossible for authorities to prove he was behind the wheel.

  It took Arizona state police months to realize the same driver was involved and was refusing to pay the fines. By the time they did, more than 50 of the tickets had become invalid because the deadline for prosecution had passed.

  Arizona began deploying the stationary and mobile cameras on state highways a year ago, and through Sept. 4 had issued more than 497,000 tickets. Of those, about 132,000 recipients had paid the fine of $165 plus a 10 percent penalty, netting the state more than $23 million. Arizona is the first to deploy such technology on highways statewide.

  Many of the remaining tickets are either new, being appealed or have just been ignored. The state didn’t have figures immediately available on the breakdown.

  The backlash against the cameras has been fairly constant, however. Arizonans have used sticky notes, Silly String and even a pickax to sabotage the cameras.

  Many believe the shooting death of speed-enforcement van operator Doug Georgianni on April 19 on a Phoenix freeway was a result of anger over the cameras, although authorities haven’t made that direct allegation.

  “It’s a peaceful act of resistance — that’s what this country was founded on,” VonTesmar said. “I’m not thumbing my nose at DPS, but photo radar is not a DPS officer protecting public safety. It’s nothing but a speed tax.”

• Tax resister NTodd Pritsky shares some meditations on civil disobedience, complicity, and knowing how much of yourself to devote to a better world when it seems like even 100% isn’t enough.
• Forbes reports that a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration investigation turned up evidence that IRS employees are issuing huge fraudulent “refunds” for fun and profit, but the IRS doesn’t have procedures in place to keep track of how manual refunds are generated, so nobody knows for sure.

IRS “customer” service has been getting worse, particularly their phone service. It used to be that your big problem when calling the agency at tax-time was in getting a reliable, correct answer to your tax questions. Nowadays, the problem is getting any answer at all. In 2009, only 64% of callers got through, and each of them had to wait on hold for an average of 519 seconds first.

This year the agency has gone begging to Congress for more money just so it can meet the pathetic goals of raising those numbers to 71% and 698 seconds (wait a minute… shouldn’t that second number be getting lower, not higher?).

698 seconds will get you through the classic “Help on the Way” → “Slipknot” → “Franklin’s Tower” studio version on Blues for Allah, so… tax filers, I recommend lighting up a doobie, dropping the needle on side one, and writing down your tax question ahead of time in case you forget it by the time someone picks up the phone.

So the IRS got audited the other day. Sounds like a joke, I know. Here’s the punch line:

According to the report, the IRS made a variety of accounting errors last year that “could adversely affect the reliability of its financial statements” and result in “duplicate or erroneous refunds.” Among the mistakes were a “failure to record the receipt of a taxpayer’s $3 million payment” and an $8 billion discrepancy between two accounting systems tracking how much money taxpayers owe. The audit also found a $5.1 billion “unexplained variance” between the total amount the agency took in last year and the amount its detailed tax files said it took in.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• We tend to think of the IRS mainly as the government’s tool for taking money from us, but these days it’s also one of the primary ways the government distributes money to people and corporations. Naturally, freelance crooks would like to get their hands on some of this officially stolen loot, and so I’m seeing more and more reports of organized tax fraud — the numbers after the dollar-sign, the number of people involved, and the brazenness of the schemes all seems to be increasing, as more people think, “the government bailed out the big guys — why not me?” Alas, many of these schemes involve filing fraudulent returns using someone else’s identity, then cashing in the “refund.” In such cases, the IRS tends to react by sending its enforcement branch after the victim of the identity-theft. Elaine Silvestrini of the Tampa Tribune listened well to some of these victims recently and found they were telling “maddening stories of fighting a seemingly malevolent bureaucracy whose employees were unaccountable and either overwhelmed, incompetent or rude.”
• The government of Spain recently amended the country’s constitution for the first time since 1992 in order to mandate deficit-cutting austerity measures and to give the repayment of government debt priority over other spending. There have been widespread protests, and one group has called on Spaniards to “exercise the right of rebellion.” The constitutional amendment, they say, was “dictated by international capital and enacted behind the backs of the people” (translation mine):

  Our commitment is to the common good, and for this reason, following our legitimate duty as citizens, we declare ourselves rebels to the constitution, insurrectionary to the State, and disobedient to all authority that it represents. For this reason we declare ourselves citizens of the popular assemblies and the assemblies of postcapitalist projects in which we participate. It is in this way that we exercise our sovereignty.

  We pledge to do everything that is in our power to construct a new, popular power that enables a new society where the decisions will be actually realized by the people.

  We understand that after the great outpouring of indignation the best way to regain our dignity is by means of rebellion.

  We understand that with our dignity comes our ability to disobey laws that are unjust and/or contrary to the benefit of the people.

  Therefore, we commit ourselves to the call to begin and extend an action of complete tax resistance against the Spanish state and those who control it, with consequent action to demonstrate that we will not pay “their debts,” because we do not recognize this constitution. A tax resistance that serves to fund the popular assemblies, and from these, giving “absolute priority” to participatory funding of the resources that we really consider public.

  Because the situation that we are experiencing in the Spanish state is common to many countries worldwide, and because the ruling economic powers are global, we encourage human beings around the world to assert their right of rebellion by means of manifestos like this.

  Tax resistance was one of the civil disobedience strategies that raised India to independence from the British Empire; now it may be a key strategy for the independence of all from global capitalism.

  We have already passed the stage of indignation, now we are a new insurgent fellowship!

  I like the sound of that a lot more than anything I’m hearing coming out of the Wall Street protests these days.
• Matt Yglesias penned a sobering speculation that one result of the difficulty the United States has had in coming up with a way to deal with its prisoners of war that is not medieval in its barbarity, is that now it prefers just to assassinate — finding a “take no prisoners” policy easier on the reputation.

Some bits and pieces from here and there.

• A recent outrage-of-the-week was the Obama administration’s attempt to require employers to provide coverage of contraception-related treatment in employer-provided health insurance plans. Some employers, you see, think contraception is immoral, and don’t think the government ought to be able to force them to violate their consciences by providing a benefit to an employee that an employee might use to do something they think is wrong. To which many folks said: “Seriously? Of all the things the government forces us to bloody our hands with, you’re getting bent about this?” For example:
  • “Catholic Bishops’ Contraception Coverage Argument Ridiculed By Pacifist Activists” by Zach Carter, HuffPost, quotes war tax resisters Ruth Benn, Karl Meyer, and Bradford Lyttle
  • “Pacifists’ ‘Conscience Objections’ to War Taxes Never Get Same Notoriety as Opposition to Funding Birth Control” by David Dayen, FireDogLake, who includes this depressing remark about the collapse of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends: “I went to a Quaker secondary school for a year, and I’m quite sure that many of the believers in the weekly meeting for worship sessions had strong religious objections to their money being used to kill other people, even in self-defense. And yet I don’t remember a single controversy in my lifetime about ‘conscience protections’ for taxpayer funds and their use in war. I don’t even remember any accounting accommodations made for that.”
  • “A modest proposal regarding religious liberty” by Mark Gordon, Vox Nova: “The principle being upheld is that as a matter of religious liberty no one ought to be forced to pay for something that violates their conscience. If that is true of government-mandated private insurance policies, and I believe it is, then it is equally true of government-mandated taxes.”
  • “Obama’s Big Government Mandates: Why no one should be forced to act against his conscience” by Sheldon Richman, reason.com, who says “Americans have been forced, without their consultation — much less permission — to finance mass murder. It’s called war, invasion, occupation, and special operations. U.S. military missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere have directly or indirectly killed over a million people who never threatened Americans at home. Those missions have ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands more through injury and the destruction of their homes and societies. The president of the United States refuses to take war with Iran off ‘the table’ … War against Iran would constitute mass murder. The U.S. government should be stopped from engaging in such brutality. But short of that, those with a conscientious objection should be free to opt out of financing these crimes.”

• Resistance to the “Household Tax” continues in Ireland. For some reason, the government is requiring citizens to actively register themselves prior to paying this tax, which is a convenient point of leverage for the resisters, who are encouraging their neighbors to simply refuse to register. “The Household Tax can be defeated by mass non registration and mass non payment but this does mean organising every street and road in the country. The first step in opposing the tax is to refuse to register yourself but to win you must organise with your neighbors — if we all stand together we will win.” Irish parliament members are among the supporters of the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes, whose spokeswoman explained: “This is not a charge to fund your local community, it is a tax to fund private speculators, bondholders and the bailout. Our incomes and services are being decimated to pay this private debt. Now people have a chance to register their opposition by not registering for this tax. By not registering, we can make this a referendum on the bailouts for the rich and the cuts for us.”
• This is similar to the argument by the “won’t pay” movement in Greece, whose government is nickle-and-diming the citizens by raising rates on utility bills, road tolls, transit fees, and so forth, to try to raise money to pay off international lenders who are openly threatening to abolish representative government in Greece entirely and instead run the country as though it were a bankrupt corporation in receivership. When the government electric power monopoly cut off power to a family of seven with a disabled child because they were unable to pay the hike, members of the “won’t pay” movement reconnected the power themselves in defiance.
• The IRS is being swamped by identity theft cases in which fraudsters use someone else’s social security number to file a tax return that qualifies for a big refund, then cash the check before the victim knows about it. The IRS then pursues the victim for having perpetrated tax fraud and tries to force them to pay back a refund they never saw. The agency’s focus on trying to get more people to file their tax returns electronically has made it easier and faster for the identity thieves to process fake returns wholesale. In Tampa, Florida, where the practice had become so widespread that local tax fraud entrepreneurs even taught classes in how to use the technique, the local news reported a few days back on “hundreds of frustrated people [who] were lined [up] at an IRS building…” waiting in long lines for hours only to find that the IRS personnel they talked to were unable to help them.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Darian Worden has written an interesting piece on the political philosophy of Henry David Thoreau for the Center for a Stateless Society.
• Longtime war tax resister David Hartsough has an opinion piece on the subject up at the Waging Nonviolence blog that’s getting some buzz around the interwebs.
• As you may have heard, the IRS got caught spending thousands of dollars of taxpayer money to make a silly Star Trek parody video. At first they tried to play it off as having been a somewhat whimsical but still useful training video, but as you can see from the video itself, there’s not much of anything in it that could be described as training material, and the agency has since admitted “that this video did not reflect the best stewardship of resources.” This is making it harder for the agency to push back against budget cuts in Congress. William Shatner himself chimed in: “I am appalled at the utter waste of US tax dollars.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Tax Day has come and gone, and NWTRCC is collecting a list of war tax resistance actions that happened on or around that day. Here’s a photo of Juanita Nelson holding her “Haven’t Paid Taxes Since 1948” sign in front of the Brattleboro post office on Tax Day.
• The Chief Counsel of the IRS Criminal Tax Division issued something called a Search Warrant Handbook a few years back to give its Criminal Investigation personnel with guidance about when they need search warrants to do their investigations. The Handbook stated:

  [T]he Fourth Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution, governing searches and seizures] does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.

  and

  [E]mails and other transmissions generally lose their reasonable expectation of privacy and thus their Fourth Amendment protection once they have been sent from an individual’s computer.

  A copy of the Internal Revenue Manual issued that year also says that “the government may obtain the contents of electronic communication that has been in storage for more than 180 days” without going through the hassle of obtaining a search warrant. Other agency memos, dating as recently as October 2011 restate the position.
  
  When the ACLU exposed these policies, there was a bit of an uproar. The agency didn’t help matters much by issuing a non-denial denial:

  Respecting taxpayer rights and taxpayer privacy are cornerstone principles for the IRS. Our job is to administer the nation’s tax laws, and we do so in a way that follows the law and treats taxpayers with respect. Contrary to some suggestions, the IRS does not use emails to target taxpayers. Any suggestion to the contrary is wrong.

  But the acting head of the IRS appeared before a Senate committee yesterday and seemed to indicate that the agency would back down, at least somewhat, and at least until the fuss dies down.
• The IRS is also catching flak for its ineptitude in dealing with identity theft. The USA Today editorial board concluded that “the crooks appear to be one step ahead of the IRS” as the IRS has responded to the growing problem by expanding its bureaucracy in a way that made things more complicated without making it more effective. In one example, a study of 17 people who had filed identity theft complaints with the IRS showed that the agency had responded by opening 58 distinct and uncoordinated cases in its myriad subunits in response.
• None of this is coming at a convenient time for the tax agency. The acting Commissioner, Steven Miller, recently appeared before the House Appropriations Committee to beg them not to cut the IRS budget any more. Miller “explained that the budget cuts that the IRS must make on account of sequestration will reduce IRS enforcement levels. In the short-term, revenue will drop because the number of audits will drop and collection activity will decline. In the long-term, the diminishing presence of the IRS will cause the voluntary compliance rate to drop, further reducing revenue.”
• Harriet Bicksler wrote an interesting piece — “Gambling on the Rapture” — about her on-again/off-again experiments with war tax resistance.
• The Mesa de Enlace Agropecuaria (Agricultural Liaison Bureau) in Argentina met in Santa Fe to decry encroaching “Marxism and Chavezism” in the country, and to call for tax resistance: “pay no taxes until June so the government cannot pay the bonuses and treat itself to a good time.”
• The American Enterprise Institute has issued a new edition of their useful compendium of poll results: Public Opinion on Taxes: 1937 to Today.

So you may have heard that the IRS has been caught targeting overreaching audits at TEA Party groups.

I’ll admit that when I first heard these groups complaining that they were being targeted for their politics, I thought they were probably just being paranoid and histrionic. Turns out they were right.

There’s somewhat less to the story than the headlines might lead you to believe. There isn’t much solid evidence that anyone in the White House, or in the IRS, was on a “let’s nail the TEA Party” kick, exactly.

The IRS did target groups for their politics, but they did so in the course of trying to find groups who were illegally politicking while organized as 501(c)(4) organizations. In other words, they were looking for political groups because they had a reason to be looking for political groups.

501(c)(4) is a variety of tax-exempt non-profit organization. You cannot be a 501(c)(4) if your purpose is to do electioneering and other such political advocacy. But you can if your main purpose is to promote “social welfare,” even if this occasionally includes political work. Naturally, this fuzziness has led to a bunch of political groups trying to redefine themselves as social welfare groups so they can qualify for the exemption. So the IRS has wanted to give extra scrutiny to applications from groups that are attempting to organize under this section to make sure they’re not campaign funds in disguise.

But the IRS, as I’ve been gleefully noting hereabouts, has been struggling with a shrinking budget and workforce in recent years. During the run-up to the last election, the agency got a bunch of applications for new 501(c)(4) groups, more than it could handle, and so it tried to come up with a way of scrutinizing those that seemed more likely than not to be improperly political groups.

One way they selected groups to scrutinize more closely — and the IRS claims that this decision was made by a rank-and-file employee of the agency — was to see if they had words like “patriot” or “TEA Party” in their names. This had the effect of skewing IRS harassment toward right-wing critics of the status quo.

501(c)(4) groups also have the advantage (particularly when they are being used as cover for electioneering) that they do not have to report who donates money to them, the way political campaigns do. But during the IRS inquiries into these right-wing protest groups, the agency asked the groups to provide a list of their donors, which it was not authorized to do. I haven’t yet seen a good explanation for how that turn of events came about (a TIGTA report on the scandal will be released soon, and may have some details).

When these groups initially raised the alarm and said they suspected they were being targeted, asked inappropriately delving questions, and having their applications delayed for partisan reasons, the IRS flatly denied it was doing anything of the sort. The recent revelations are an embarrassing walk-back for the agency.

There really isn’t a whole lot of meat on the bones of the big IRS TEA Party tempest that everyone is up in arms about, as far as I can tell.

But thank goodness nobody cares what I think about it. The Fox News demographic is engaging in their usual well-choreographed outrage (their liberal counterparts, with very few exceptions, are conspicuously talking about something else). That much is predictable. But apparently things got bad enough that Obama had to knit his brow in public and put on his angry face. The Attorney General launched a criminal probe of the IRS personnel responsible, and Obama demanded the resignation of the current acting IRS chief (who wasn’t in charge when the controversial IRS policy was in force, and who apparently is getting canned for mostly symbolic reasons, or perhaps because he wasn’t proactively forthcoming about what he knew about the scandal).

Imagine the overworked, underpaid (or at least salary-frozen) IRS workforce — facing several furlough days this year — now knowing that trying to take creative shortcuts at work might lead to criminal charges if they step on the wrong toes — without a leader at the helm (Obama hasn’t yet nominated a replacement for the old IRS commissioner, who left office seven months ago, and the acting chief just got the scapegoat treatment) — being asked to be the bureaucratic force behind the complex, confusing, and controversial health industry overhaul that’s just beginning to come into force (without being given enough resources to do the job, thanks to a hostile Congress).

Expect more meltdowns and bureaucratic snafus. Each one of which will lead to more outrage directed at the IRS, more Congressional reluctance to give the agency the money it needs, further declines in employee morale at the service, and increasing inefficiency of tax collection.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The creative activists of the Free Keene movement are at it again. This time they’ve formed a group called “Robin Hood of Keene” that shadows parking enforcement officers on their rounds and quickly fills expired meters before they can reach them to write out tickets.

  Members of the group place cards under windshield wipers that read, “Your meter expired; however, we saved you from the king’s tariffs, Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Please consider paying it forward,” and includes an address where donations can be sent.

  Alleging that the Robin Hooders have “repeatedly and intentionally taunted, interfered with, harassed, and intimidated” the meter officers, the city has filed for a restraining order (the activists insist that this has nothing to do with any intimidation or harassment on their part, but with the city’s loss of revenue from the thousands of parking tickets they have prevented).

  In the filing, parking enforcement officer Linda Desruisseaux said, “Besides following me, crowding around me, making video recordings of my activities, and placing coins in expired meters to prevent me from writing tickets, these individuals repeatedly taunt and harass me, asking why I am stealing peoples’ money and telling me to get another job… In particular, Graham Colson likes to taunt me by saying, ‘Linda, guess what you’re not going to do today — write tickets.’… The taunting and harassment tends to get worse when there is a group, as they try to one-up each other at my expense.”

• The IRS scandal that all the frogs are croaking about is largely a steaming pile of political bullshit… but the winds are blowing the smell directly into the offices of the IRS, which which is making it an unpleasant place to do business:

  A former Internal Revenue Service official who ran the unit now at the center of scandal says the agency is about to be hit by a wave of resignations that he fears will hobble its operations.

  “I think there’s going to be a significant number of departures from the agency,” said Marcus Owens, a Washington attorney who served as director of the exempt-organizations’ office from 1990 to 2000.

  The same post is now occupied by Lois Lerner, who has come under fire for her agency’s treatment of conservative groups. “That’s going to have an impact on tax collections and tax administration,” said Mr. Owens, who said he thinks the controversy has been overblown.

  Mr. Owens, who worked for the IRS for 25 years, said a number of IRS officials have talked to him about their plans to leave. He said the investigations underway have crushed morale, while some IRS officials are starting to get threatening anonymous calls at home.

• Dan Carpenter uses the occasion to note how the IRS treats anti-war tax protesters — along the way mentioning or quoting war tax resisters Julie Garber, Phil & Louise Rieman, Kenneth & Viona Brown, and Lonnie Valentine.
• In the other IRS scandal, the one that to me seems more actually scandalous, the agency has backed down from its repulsive legal opinion that Americans have no legitimate privacy expectations in their email communications, so agency investigators should feel free to rifle through them without bothering to get a warrant. The new policy says the agency won’t aim to read your email at all if it is only pursuing a civil action against you, and will “in all cases” obtain a warrant when trying to get your email from whichever Internet service provider is storing it, when pursuing criminal cases.
• Fran Quigley at Counterpunch takes another look at the Transform Now Plowshares case, and in particular how the government progressively ratcheted up a misdemeanor trespassing charge against the three pacifists until now they stand convicted of federal terrorism felonies, awaiting sentencing from jail as they’ve been deemed violent criminals too dangerous to release.
• The fabled Greek crackdown on tax evasion seems mostly for show: “of the estimated 13 billion euros that government officials say is owed by Greece’s 1,500 biggest tax debtors, only about 19 million euros [≈0.1%] has been collected in the last two and a half years.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The campaign to get people and institutions in Catalonia to redirect their Spanish federal taxes to the Catalan regional government continues to pick up steam. About a dozen companies and a dozen more municipalities are participating in the redirection campaign, and they were recently joined by three members of congress: Alfred Bosch, Joan Tardà, and Teresa Jordà. The campaign seems to be largely symbolic, as the current policy of the Catalan tax office is just to re-redirect such taxes back to the federal treasury. This also means that the federal government has not felt any urgent need to take reprisals against the redirectors. I get the feeling the redirecters hope to change this policy, and hope that when they do, people will already be in the habit of sending their taxes to the regional agency.
• The IRS snafu, in which some agency personnel improperly gave extra scrutiny to TEA Party groups that had filed for recognition as non-electioneering 501(c)4 “social welfare” groups, has turned public opinion strongly against the tax agency.
• If you’d like to catch up on the interesting autonomist tax resistance movement in Spain, and its “Offices of Economic Disobedience”, and you’re up on your español, you might take a listen to Barrio Canino’s Radio Ágora Sol show.

You may have noticed less activity hereabouts than usual. Many things are contributing to this, among which are the delights of early summer and the sudden intermittent failure of the ‘b’, ‘n’, and ‘=’ keys on my laptop. But I’m also putting in a lot more of my tax resistance writing energy into finishing off my book and less into the blog.

Meanwhile, here are a few bits and pieces from here and there:

• Vickie Aldrich won her battle with the IRS. You may remember that the agency hit her with a “frivolous filing” penalty for including a letter of protest with her tax return. Since the return itself was filled out correctly and completely, by law she should not have been subject to such a penalty, but the IRS gave her one anyway, in a sort of knee-jerk fashion. The way the agency has gamed the rules, you have to pay the fine before you appeal it, so they’ve got conscientious tax resisters over a barrel. In Aldrich’s case, she got some legal help and managed to get the agency to accept $500 (10% of the fine). But, as I noted last month, the IRS finally figured out that they were overstepping their bounds by issuing such penalties, and, according to Aldrich, they have refunded her $500 with interest.
• The rolling ball of pundit dung called the “IRS scandal” continues to pick up new residue:
  • “The Internal Revenue Service spent $17,000 to hire a speaker who painted pictures of Michael Jordan and U2 singer Bono to motivate employees at a 2010 conference in California, the agency’s inspector general said.”
  • That’s the part of that particular scandalette that makes for vivid headlines, but more serious are the allegations that IRS employees skirted the rules when setting up conferences: accepting kickbacks in the form of luxury ($1,500/night) room upgrades and other hotel perks rather than trying to find a low-cost venue.
  • The IRS employees involved in these scandals say they are receiving anonymous threats of physical violence, and some of the Cincinnati employees are avoiding the office and working from home.
  • It’s unlikely that the agency will find much sympathy in Congress as they appeal for more funding to help fix their dysfunctional and increasingly burdened organization. Take a look at this graph of IRS funding history to see the sort of fix they’re in.
• If you clicked that last link, you’ll see that Congress appropriated $11,190,000,000 to the IRS for this fiscal year. Keep that in mind, oh TEA Party, when you read this article about how the U.S. military spent $20,200,000,000 per year just on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

Tax resistance in Catalonia

• Deputies from Esquerra Republicana (Republican Left of Catalonia) and Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (Popular Unity Candidates) paid their federal taxes to the Catalan tax agency rather than sending them to the central government in Barcelona. The secretary general of Esquerra Republicana explained the purpose of what has been derided as a symbolic tactic (the Catalan tax agency forwards such taxes to Barcelona itself):

  “Already there is an embrionic tax agency that we would like to have, and we think that it should be the first great structure of State and that we will have to have it as soon as possible.” [Quim] Arrufat [of Candidatura d’Unitat Popular] defended symbolic actions as a path for changing things: “Symbolism is a great weapon for all those who want to change reality. The sum of small individual actions is that which triggers grand political events.”

  According to the article, 100 municipalities have passed resolutions to pay their taxes in this way (twelve have already done so), and 500 individuals have also done this.
• Marta Rovira, the Esquerra Republicana spokesperson in the regional parliament, explained: “It should be a very simple and ordinary act that we Catalans could pay our taxes into the tax agency of Catalonia, and it should also be normal that the money that we pay in Catalonia is invested for the benefit of our fellow citizens.”
• Some towns are holding referendums on whether or not to proceed with their tax resistance, or “fiscal sovereignty,” as they put it.
• In Alcarrás, city councilors from Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (Socialist Party of Catalonia) and Partido Popular (People’s Party) also got in on the fun — voting for an Esquerra Republicana-sponsored city motion to pay municipal taxes to the Catalan tax agency.

  The text of the motion says that “day by day Catalonia appears more afflicted by a financial strangulation derived from the politicization of economic decisions taken by the Government of Madrid,” that involves a “grave obstacle” for towns to be able to offer services that have been entrusted. “The serious looting keeps us from getting back on our feet,” it adds.

The IRS scandals

• The piranha continue to churn the waters around the increasingly meatless corpse of the IRS Scandals of 2013. Things that in normal times would become just-another-minor-government-scandal are now getting the high melodrama treatment. Case in point: an IRS information technology contractor who had a cozy relationship with an influential insider at the agency, and who manipulated government programs that give preferential treatment to contractors who are in certain economically-troubled areas or are owned by disabled veterans (in this case, the owner broke his foot, decades ago, while in a military prep school).
• The IRS gives “purchase cards” to its employees in lieu of expense accounts. A recent audit found that employees had used these cards to purchase $140 meals, diet pills, romance novels, online porn, a “world’s largest crossword puzzle,” and… I’m trying to picture this… “kazoos, toy boats, and Thomas the Tank Engine rubber wristbands for managers’ meetings.”
• “The IRS held a 2008 conference in Atlanta that included an open bar, elaborate hors d’oeuvres and a video of agency employees dressed as Olympic athletes with makeshift torches. The ‘grand finale’ of the conference, held during President George W. Bush’s administration, was an awards dinner at the Georgia Aquarium catered by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck…”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Earlier this year I went through all the back issues of Friends Journal to review how the practice of Quaker war tax resistance underwent a revival and then retreated again in the last half century or so. We’re at the bottom of the retreat trough today. There has been almost nothing about war tax resistance in the Journal this year. The latest issue does have some mentions, but they’re pretty much all in the obituaries:
  • The obituary notice for Mary Caroline Mendenhall notes that she was part of the Fairhope single-tax corporation — a “cooperative community that hoped to address the challenges to conscience that came through the payment of taxes” — and that she was one of those Quakers who emigrated to the Monteverde settlement in Costa Rica after she “became uncomfortable with the draft and with paying taxes that contributed to militarism.”
  • The obituary notice for Edward Webster says that he and his wife Susan “stopped paying war taxes for a period [in 1967], started the Roxbury War Tax Scholarship Fund as a place for war tax resisters to redirect a portion of their taxes to, and counter-recruited at high schools.”
• Spanish war tax resister Paco Ortega has joined up with the Stop Evictions group from Granada’s 15M assembly and has expanded his war tax resistance so that now he also refuses to pay the portion of his taxes devoted to the state police and national guard, legislature, monarchy, prison, election and party financing, and interest on the debt — a bit over 31% of his tax bill. He’s redirecting the resisted portion of his taxes to the Stop Evictions project.
• IRS ineptitude is an evergreen news item. The latest example includes such fun facts as “the IRS sent at least 343 potentially fraudulent tax returns in 2011 to the same, single address in Shanghai, China, for a total of $156,533 in tax refunds” — “655 potentially fraudulent tax refunds totaling $220,489 were sent to the same address in Kaunas, Lithuania.”
• They’re not getting any help from Congress. The government estimates that as a result of the recent shutdown histrionics, “the IRS was unable to collect about $1-billion per week from its enforcement activities. In addition to delaying the start of the 2014 tax-filing season by up to two weeks, the shutdown will cost the federal government billions of dollars in interest on late IRS refunds and late payments to federal contractors…”
• The government of Thailand was contemplating a law that would have granted amnesty to politicians who had perpetrated a variety of crimes over the past decade. The opposition called for general strikes and tax resistance, and the government abandoned the amnesty plan.
• “This year will set a record for expatriations by U.S. taxpayers, with at least a 33% increase from the previous high in 2011.” The latest big name giving the kiss off to the sweet land of liberty? Tina Turner.
• I’ve been reading a lot about tollgate and traffic camera destruction by the bonnets rouges of Bretaigne lately. Here’s an example of a somewhat more light-hearted protest: temporarily disabling such cameras by wrapping them in plastic, painting a happy face on them, and topping them with a bonnet rouge.
• In Greece, the toll resisters depended less on destruction and more on mass action — mobbing the toll booths, lifting the gates, and waving the drivers through. Some of these activists are being prosecuted now (with mixed success). But yet more infuriating? The country’s legislature has voted itself a new benefits package, and among those benefits: legislators don’t have to pay highway tolls!

Back in May, the IRS sent me a letter telling me that they’d changed some of the numbers on my tax return: raising my adjusted gross income and taxable income by a couple hundred dollars, but lowering my self-employment tax by over $350. I figured I’d probably screwed up somewhere in my spreadsheet, maybe forgetting to update a previous year’s equation somewhere, and so I wrote back to ask them for the details of why they made the corrections they did: what component of my adjusted gross income they increased and why, what part of my tax calculation they adjusted and why (this information was not part of their original letter to me).

Not a very complicated question to answer, you’d think. But since then they’ve sent me two letters on the matter, the latest of which arrived today, over four months since my query. Both essentially say they haven’t had time to get around to it yet.

I expect that most everyone dealing with the IRS is getting this sort of glacial service these days, which ought to help to improve levels of taxpayer resentment and unwillingness to cooperate.

In other news…

• A writer at the Episcopal Peace Fellowship site recently shared her thoughts after attending a war tax resistance workshop in Rochester, New York. Excerpt:

  I had the opportunity to meet with folks who have been war tax resisters since WW2 and with folks just turning the idea over in their minds. It was a powerful experience for me. I have never understood the depth of calling that moves folks to civil disobedience. In Ithaca, I am surrounded by folks that have protested for years, many have been arrested for their beliefs and some have served time for civil disobedience. This weekend I saw with an open heart and with new eyes.

• The Boston Globe has a good article on the epidemic of identity theft and how lucrative the IRS makes it for the thieves. Excerpts:

  All told, in just the first six months of last year, 1.6 million taxpayers were affected by identity theft, compared with 271,000 for all of 2010, according to a recent audit by the Treasury Department’s inspector general. While the IRS said it discovered many of the incidents, the cumulative thefts have resulted in billions of dollars in potentially fraudulent refunds, according to an array of government reports.

  “I’ve had a police chief tell me ‘street crime is down because everybody is now filing false IRS returns,’ ” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who took office last month, said in an interview.

  While Koskinen stressed that the IRS uses a series of “filters” that are increasingly successful in catching identity thefts before refunds are paid, he acknowledged that “this problem has exploded” and that the agency is in a constant race to keep its detection techniques a step ahead of the thieves. “It is,” he said, “a little like ‘Whac-a-Mole,’ knock them down here and they come up over there.”

  “We have seen drug dealers go into this because it is easy access to money. Gangs go into this because it is easy access to money. Or at least they perceive it that way,” [U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the tax division Kathryn] Keneally said, while adding: “Please, if you quote me on saying ‘It is easy access to money,’ include: ‘We are changing that equation and we are adding risk to that.’ ”

• To your typical amateur, the tax law can often seem like it was designed to entrap the unwary. You take some common sense step, or think you’re following the law, only to find that some obscure provision somewhere unexpected ensnares you in some subordinate clause’s cross-reference to an unfamiliar acronym. So it’s hard not to react with a hearty har-har when you hear that when the IRS itself was audited, by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the auditor found that for 39% of the money the agency paid out to its employees as relocation reimbursement it failed to record that money as taxable income as the law requires. The IRS executives who qualified for the reimbursements thought of them, naturally, as a tax-free perk — but that’s not how the law treats them.

Networks of enterprising people around the world have discovered that they can siphon off some of the IRS’s ill-gotten goods by impersonating U.S. taxpayers and applying for refunds. This has become an enormous enterprise, with practitioners both foreign and domestic (including some who have managed to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars this way from behind bars), and the IRS has only managed to slow the bleeding.

And now these criminal entrepreneurs have struck on the idea of working the game from the other side — they’re impersonating the IRS itself, calling up American citizens, and threatening them with government retribution — such as imminent arrest, deportation, license revocations, or property seizure — if they don’t pay some invented tax liability immediately (but, pay to the scammers, not to the real IRS).

The government calls it the “largest ever” scam of this sort — involving tens of thousands of victims, and millions of dollars in extorted payments. Hilariously, in warning people about the scam, the Treasury Inspector General for Taxpayer Administration claims:

“If someone unexpectedly calls claiming to be from the IRS and uses threatening language if you don’t pay immediately, that is a sign that it really isn’t the IRS calling,” he [Inspector General J. Russell George] said.

Sounds like Mr. George has never gotten a call from the IRS before!

The upshot of this is that the real IRS is going to have a harder time than usual distinguishing itself from smaller-scale thieves, and is going to have to devote even more energy into trying to assert its legitimacy.

And that’s energy the agency doesn’t have to spare — it has fewer employees now than at any time in the last decade, and much more to do: including implementing much of Obamacare, chasing down the rampant identity thieves, and responding to sweeping Congressional subpoenas regarding the TEA Party-targeting kerfluffle.

And morale at the agency has taken a dive for a number of reasons, exacerbating office conflicts, as a whistleblowing letter from IRS attorney Jane J. Kim reveals.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Anne Grace’s study of the Beit Sahour tax resistance campaign from the Journal of Palestine Studies is now available on-line.
• This sort of news is always an embarrassment for the IRS and contributes to taxpayer cynicism and noncompliance: the agency paid out more than a million dollars in employee bonuses to IRS employees who were themselves not tax-compliant.
• The New York Times published an interesting piece earlier this month on “Raising a Moral Child” that spotlights some of the current thinking on how children learn to become ethically engaged. The summary is that it is important to praise and guide children with an eye to making them value their own characters and to understand how their behaviors form their characters. Another data point that suggests the practical value of an Aristotle-style “virtue ethics” approach.
• Berry Friesen compared token war tax resistance to the sorts of taboos that set early Christians apart from their contemporaries.
• In an interview found on YouTube, Chris Coverdale explains why war tax resistance may be legally compulsory in a post-Nuremberg Trials world.
• Those of us committed to fomenting tax resistance would be wise to keep our eyes on the research of those committed to encouraging tax compliance, as their conclusions often have mirror-images that will be useful to us. The latest in this series is a paper by Richard Lavoie entitled Vox Clamantis in Deserto: The Role of the Individual in Forging a Strong Duty to the Tax System. Excerpt:

  Societies exhibiting high tax morale typically maintain stable levels of high tax compliance over time (establishing a societal “taxpaying ethos”) as these underlying foundational attitudes become enshrined as self-maintaining social norms. However, if the underlying social norms begin to erode over time, a society historically exhibiting a strong taxpaying ethos can quickly flip into a non-compliant one once a tipping point is reached.

  With the exception of some aberrational sub-groups, the United States typifies a society with a strong taxpaying ethos. However, in recent decades the social norms forming the foundation of this ethos appear to have weakened. Scandals at the Service have weakened its public image. The rise of the tea party movement has questioned the efficacy and role of government, as well as promoting the highly questionable proposition that Americans are currently “overtaxed.” Politicians, who should defend the government that they were elected to run, often act to undermine its legitimacy and advocate for steep spending cuts in addition to tax reductions.

  These forces, among others, threaten the very foundations of our tax system by undermining our historical societal faith in the fairness of our tax system and the obligation to fund necessary government services.

• The Tax Foundation has drawn up a map that purports to show how cigarette smuggling in the United States is correlated to the tobacco tax rates in those states. So, for instance: “New York is the highest net importer of smuggled cigarettes, totaling 56.9 percent of the total cigarette market in the state. New York also has the highest state cigarette tax ($4.35 per pack), not counting the local New York City cigarette tax (an additional $1.50 per pack). Smuggling in New York has risen sharply since 2006 (+59 percent), as has the tax rate (+190 percent).”
• The Hartford Courant recently published a look back at Julia & Abby Smith, the tax-resisting women’s rights activists of Glastonbury, and the Worcester Historical Museum and the American Antiquarian Society recently announced that they had digitized and made available on-line The Abbey Kelley Foster Papers, allowing us a deeper look into the life of another nineteenth century American tax resister for women’s rights.
• Wendy McElroy speculates that the IRS may be contemplating revoking passports from people behind on their taxes.
• The phone security consultants “pindrop” have done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the massive ongoing criminal operation in which American immigrants are shaken down over the phone by people masquerading as IRS agents. They estimate that 450,000 people were targeted by this scam in March alone. Pindrop also posted their analysis of how the scam works, and even some excerpts from a recording of one of the calls.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• A new website called earthineer is designed for the do-it-yourself, homesteading sorts… and it is developing a barter & marketplace feature that looks like it could be very useful to those of us trying to move as much as possible into the solidarity economy. (ᔥ Claire Wolfe)
• Some families in Sligo and in Carlow, Ireland, barricaded their neighborhoods to prevent the installation of water meters that are going to be facilitating a new stealth tax on water.
• The Richmond Times-Dispatch did a profile on war tax resister and gay-rights activist Jon Klein.
• The snack bar at the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, D.C., was shut down when inspectors found rodent droppings and other health violations.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The IRS is envisioning hiring freezes and furloughs this year, but also seems to be showing a strange lack of care when it does hire people — particularly as tax-season temporary help. According to a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration audit, the agency rehired hundreds of former employees who had significant “substantiated conduct or performance issues” during a previous stint with the agency, including “unauthorized access to taxpayer information, leave abuse, falsification of official forms, unacceptable performance, misuse of IRS property, and off-duty misconduct” — indeed five such new hires “had willfully failed to file their Federal tax returns.”
• Speaking of IRS woes. Here’s a link to a promotional video about the IRS’s new data processing computers… back when they were new. According to agency commissioner John Koskinen, they haven’t changed much since then. “We’re running applications that were running when John F. Kennedy was president. That’s how antiquated the system is.”
• The Nuclear Resister profiles war tax resister and activist Bonnie Urfer. “Bonnie’s conscientiously self-limited income keeps her from supporting the war system which now gets about half of everyone’s federal income taxes. Living under the taxable limit has always been part of her life of resisting militarism in thought, word and deed.”

I got some mail from the IRS a few days back (though for some reason the letters are dated a few days in the future).

The letters inform me that I have overdue taxes for six tax years, to which penalties & interest have been added (though they don’t itemize this in the letters; they just give me the totals):

As their customary way of reminding me how wisely the government spends tax dollars, they informed me of these amounts in six different letters sent in six different envelopes and accompanied by six return envelopes.

I haven’t sent in my 2014 return yet, but I expect it’ll put them after me for another $6,000 or so. In 2008 I didn’t make enough to owe anything, so that year is missing.

Today, a roundup of links from here and there:

American War Tax Resisters

• Ruth Benn reports on war tax resister presence at the protests surrounding the United Nations review of the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty.
• Here are some photos from NWTRCC’s national gathering in Milwaukee earlier this month. Erica Weiland wrote up a recap of the gathering.
• On the radio program A Prairie Home Companion, host Garrison Keillor gave a nod to war tax resistance in the course of a segment telling the story of the history of the Mennonites and another comic dramatization of a whimsical tax resister. Check out the “Garrison Keillor talks about the history of Mennonites” and “Catchup” segments in the archives.

IRS Woes

• The Treasury Department’s inspector-general issued a report stating that over a recent ten-year period, 1580 IRS employees “were found to have willfully evaded taxes.” Most (75%) were not fired, and some later received promotions, raises, and bonuses.
• The number of people who renounced their U.S. citizenship is aiming toward another record high this year. The first quarter of the year saw 1,335 people tell Sam “you’re not my uncle” — a new record.

Tax Resistance Campaigns Around the World

• Spanish war tax resisters have produced a stylish video to promote their cause: No Pagamos (We Aren’t Paying):

• Police brutality, discrimination, and mistreatment towards Israel’s Ethopian Jewish minority has led to protests, clashes, and to Shlomo Molla, one of the few Ethiopian-Israelis to have been in the Israeli parliament, calling for tax resistance, refusal to serve in the army, and other forms of civil disobedience.
• Paul Nicolson, a retired Anglican vicar, took his local council government to court, saying the £125 in fees it had added to the council tax that he had refused to pay in protest were excessive. He won his case.
• Payroll tax arrears are up 19% over the last fiscal year in Hong Kong and some are blaming the conscientious tax resistance movement (良心抗稅運動) that was launched as part of the pro-democracy “umbrella movement” there.
• Forty villages in Guragon, India have decided not to pay a new “house tax” the (Haryana) state government is trying to impose on them.
• The Chamber of Commerce and Industry in the northern Indian state of Jammu announced a policy of “total non-cooperation” including tax resistance in order to pressure the state government to meet its demands.

The IRS noticed that I didn’t include a check with my tax return again this year.

They responded by sending one of their “Amount Due” CP14 letters. It contained a surprise:

What’s that −$12.00 “Payments and credits” bit?

That is the same amount that I paid for my health insurance this year. I have one of the Obamacare exchange’s heavily-subsidized plans. Indeed, according to the rules, I’m supposed to get this plan for free, but for some reason the insurance company insists on charging me a token $1 per month for it. I’m able to take this $12 as a credit on my tax return (line #69: “Net premium tax credit”).

But the $5,548.00 shown above is exactly $12 more than the $5,536.00 that I calculated on my 1040, so apparently they added this back in on my tax return and then subtracted it as a “payments and credits” amount.

I’m not quite sure what to think of this shell game. Did the IRS trick me into paying $12 in taxes last year by disguising it as health insurance premium payments? Or, because I’m getting free health insurance on Washington’s dime, do I have nothing to complain about?

Included with the letter was an explanation of the penalties (0.5% of what I owe per month, until the amount hits 25% at which point the penalties stop), and interest (currently 3% per year, but subject to change).

Also included was a copy of their new single-sheet Publication 1: “Your Rights as a Taxpayer: The Taxpayer Bill of Rights.” This is a document the agency released with much fanfare a while back. Though called a “Bill of Rights” in mimicry of the set of Constitutional amendments, this bill of rights is thoroughly unenforceable and creates no new obligations for the IRS. It’s more of a “rights we’d like you to think you enjoy until such time as we decide to violate them” list. A cynical “customer relations” sort of ploy.

For example, #2: “The Right to Quality Service” (“Taxpayers have the right to receive prompt, courteous, and professional assistance in their dealings with the IRS…”) was notoriously violated this year: the agency shut down its in-house tax preparation clinics, kept callers on hold for an average of a half-an-hour or so (and even so more than half of those who called in never reached anyone — the agency flat-out hung up on eight million calls without answering them), and refused to answer any but the most basic tax questions. The agency, of course, claimed that Congressional budget cuts were to blame — but they were caught diverting some of their discretionary funds from customer service.

IRS follies are piling up fast:

• Remember how the IRS was caught seizing money from people and businesses without bothering to give them any sort of due process — using asset forfeiture powers and transaction structuring rules to commit brazen theft? Congress held hearings in which they pretended to be outraged at the agency’s use of the laws Congress had passed specifically to encourage such crimes. The agency promised they would stop. But stop they did not. They were caught once again, this time stealing $107,000 from a businessman, offering to give half of it back as a compromise, and threatening him if he went public about it. He lawyered up and contacted the Institute for Justice (like the ACLU but less likely to trip over politically-correct nonsense) and they helped him get all of his money back from the thieves.
• The IRS was also caught illegally trying to shake down tax preparers by inventing a requirement to be licensed by the agency. 89,000 tax preparers paid $116 apiece to take a competency test devised by the agency before a court ruled that the IRS had no legal authority to establish this requirement. Now the agency has been forced to refund the $10 million ill-gotten gains from the scheme.
• An IRS worker decided to call in to Howard Stern’s radio show while on the job. He was put on hold, and decided to take a call from a taxpayer while he was waiting. Then: “When the radio show took the IRS representative’s call off hold, it apparently wasn’t made clear to the IRS representative — who just kept talking. That conversation was broadcast on air.”

  How did the woman find out? Her phone started buzzing as she received numerous calls and texts from all over the country. Her personal phone number had been broadcast along with part of the conversation.

  The woman told a local news outlet that the incident has been “devastating” and she has not been able to eat because of the stress. Of course, she’s considering lawyering up.

• Does the name Lois Lerner ring a bell? She’s the bête noire of the IRS targeting scandal that the American right-wing can’t stop turning with their pitchforks. But you might have missed this angle: Lois Lerner was also apparently the go-to person for the Japanese whaling industry which was lobbying to get the agency to revoke the 501(c)3 charity status from the anti-whaling Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
• So much money is being made through identity theft by filing for bogus tax refunds by impersonating U.S. taxpayers, I suppose it was inevitable that those with the best access to taxpayer identifying information — IRS employees themselves — would try to get in on the action. And try they have. We only hear about the ones that get caught, of course, but they’re likely only the tip of the iceberg.
• Identity thieves used the IRS’s “Get Transcript” service (by which taxpayers could get copies of their tax returns and other data from their IRS files) to get the tax info from 100,000 taxpayers. With this information, the thieves will be better able to impersonate that unlucky 100,000 for a variety of scams, and will be able to file very authentic-seeming amended returns going back several years to efficiently steal millions of dollars back from the agency.
• Is it any surprise that only 31% of Americans trust the IRS to enforce the tax laws fairly?

And now, a bit of domestic tax resistance news:

• Long-time war tax resister Karen Marysdaughter explores the links between war tax resistance and environmental activism.
• While the IRS has been complaining that budget cuts and corresponding cuts to collection personnel will cause revenue from collections to fall, the latest stats aren’t showing much of a correlation.
• There’s a new semiannual Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report out. It’s a real page-turner, but if you don’t have the time, here are a couple of highlights:
  • The report counts 3,300 people who have been fooled by phony IRS agents who call them up to threaten them about a tax debt and get them to send money to the scammers. The scam has netted something like $16.8 million. These figures may be understating the problem, as some people who got fooled probably haven’t spoken up about it.
  • The IRS rehired 141 former employees who had had “prior substantiated conduct or performance issues” “including [such issues as] willfully failed to file their tax returns… unauthorized access to taxpayer information, leave abuse, falsification of official forms, unacceptable performance, misuse of IRS property, and off-duty misconduct.” And nearly 20 percent of these also had such issues filed against them after having been rehired. Most curious to me is that when the IRS had this pointed out to them, their response was to say that they see no reason to change their hiring practices.
• Erica Weiland reflects on the NWTRCC presence at the recent Social Forum in San Jose, California.
• I still think the whole IRS scandal involving the screening of Tea Party groups that were trying to game the nonprofit system to engage in electioneering was largely bullshit. But whether from arrogance or incompetence or from more conniving motives, the agency is sure acting like it’s covering up something. Bullshit or not, the agency is doing as much as its enemies to keep the scandal alive.
• Oh yeah, and the IRS penned $19 million in contracts with contractors who haven’t paid their taxes. That’s against the law… not the not-paying-taxes part, which you already knew, but the doing business with tax-scofflaw companies part. Not that anyone at the agency will get in trouble for it.

Your tax resistance news round-up:

International News

• Tax collectors turned up at a festival in Maritsa, in Rhodes, Greece, and were forced to flee under police protection when the crowd turned on them with jeers and insults. The papers note: “This is the second time that tax officers have been prevented from performing their duties on the island in a period of less than two weeks.”
• Market areas across Pakistan shut down in a business strike protesting a new tax withholding system. According to one account: “This was the first time in the history of Pakistan that traders, goods transporters, custom clearing agents and traders’ bodies gave the strike call.”

U.S. News

• The right-wing of the domestic internet has lately been outraged about Planned Parenthood, over the issue of abortion in particular. I’ve lost track of how many tweets I’ve seen that are variations on “I’m going to stop paying taxes if the government doesn’t stop funding Planned Parenthood!” Easier tweeted than done, of course, and today’s American right-wingers have a pretty poor record of follow-through on threats like these. But then there’s Ann Barnhardt. She’s a Catholic counter-reformist who burned a Koran on camera (“bookmarked with raw bacon”) and who shut down her financial services business in 2011 to “Go Galt” and stop paying taxes. In a post on her blog, Barnhardt explains why the Bible’s “Render Unto Caesar…” verse doesn’t discourage her from refusing to pay federal taxes. Her conclusion:

  Enough is enough. You cannot subsidize this government and still claim that God is “first” in your life. It is mathematically, metaphysically and morally impossible. You must choose your allegiances now. You must now choose who or what it is that you truly worship. Do you worship God or do you worship your wealth? Here’s a simple litmus test for you: are you or are you not willing to give up all of your wealth in bearing witness to God in His Truth? If the answer is no, then stop calling yourself a Christian, because you very simply are not.

• The IRS hung up on 8.8 million callers who tried to contact the agency during this year’s tax filing season. Only 37% of those who called actually managed to hear a non-recorded voice. The IRS calls these hang-ups “courtesy disconnects.”

Some tax resistance related news from the United States:

• American war tax resister and pillar of the Eugene, Oregon activist community Peg Morton has died. Here’s a tribute from Erica Weiland of NWTRCC, and another from the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
• The Boston Review takes a closer look at the Boston Tea Party, and how American perspectives on who did it and what it meant have changed over time.
• James Ferguson looks at the new ability of the government to revoke passports from people with tax debts in the light of the long-standing international legal norm concerning freedom to travel.
• Socially responsible companies pay lower taxes, and this is descriptive, not just prescriptive.
• Bucking recent downward trends, the IRS actually picked up a budget increase from a hostile Congress. The increase restores part of what was cut from the agency budget last year and reportedly earmarks it for taxpayer service, fraud detection, and cybersecurity. Along with the money came a set of new restrictions on the agency and its employees, most of which seem to be in the category of “appearing to put the screws to the IRS for the benefit of any constituents in the Tea Party who may be watching.”
• With Congressional hostility and budget-slashing added to the mix, the jobs of IRS workers are even more miserable than usual lately. It doesn’t help recruitment when your facilities are infested with bedbugs.

  The bed bugs were so bad at her new job with the Covington IRS office that some people covered their seats with plastic bags, Kelly Anderson said.

  After two days, she quit.

  “It’s important to have a second income in our home, but it’s not worth the risk of bringing those home. So, I will not be returning back.”

• And that’s not the only kind of bug the IRS is plagued with. A computer glitch caused the agency to emit tens of millions of dollars in refunds that its software had identified as likely to be fraudulent and that should have been held up.
• Another IRS office closed abruptly recently, posting a sign in its window reading “This office is closed due to local weather conditions.” This on a sunny day in California’s central valley, leaving frustrated taxpayers, who had driven in from as far as three hours away, fuming.
• Shareable has named my article on How to Not Pay Taxes as one of its Top 10 Stories of All-Time.

Some links that have flashed by my browser in recent days:

IRS Follies

• It takes so long to reach the IRS by phone that a company has gone into business selling places in the phone queue. That’s right. They have many lines on which they call the IRS and stay on hold, and then you call them and buy the line that has been on hold longest so you don’t have to wait so long. Somewhere, a star on Obama’s economic team is tallying this up as “innovative job creation.”
• Identity thieves have been so successful at stealing “refunds” from the IRS by filing phony tax returns by using the social security numbers of other people that the IRS started issuing a supplemental identification number — an “E-file PIN” — that taxpayers could use to prove that it really was them filing their return. Because they figured the identity thieves, having stolen one identification number, wouldn’t be able to steal the second one, I guess.
• The number of IRS employees continues to fall. The agency says it plans to shed another 2–3,000 people this year.

International Tax Resistance News

• Anjali Damania and Alyque Padamsee have started a taxpayers union and have launched a tax strike to protest government corruption in India.

  Padamsee claimed that he always does everything legal and correct. He said, “I checked with lawyers. We are a group of like-minded people, and the tax paying population of this country, and they said, anyone who works together could form a union. And by law, a union is allowed to strike. We will strike by not paying tax. We plan to assemble a million people with a fee of Re 1 each, but all this is at the planning stage. We are talking with senior lawyers and will have them on board. Our main aim will be to make the government accountable. If there are any recommendations, people can contact me.”

  However, it is not yet specified which tax the Tax Payers’ Union will not pay, as there are various taxes in India, and most of them are indirect tax, which one pays in form of service, or while buying products. The other important taxes which concern an individual directly, include income tax and professional tax.

  This idea seems to be catching on. Justice Arun Chaudhari, from the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court, in a ruling during a recent corruption case, said:

  In my considered opinion, corruption can be beaten if all work together. To eradicate the cancer of corruption — the “hydra-headed monster,” it is now a high time for the citizens to come together to tell their governments that they have had enough. That is the miasma of of corruption. If the same continues, taxpayers may resort to refuse to pay taxes by “non-cooperation movement.”

• Tommaso Cerno, a journalist and gay rights activist in Friuli, Italy, has made waves by announcing, in a letter published in Repubblica, a tax strike for gay rights.
• George Theofanou, who participated in the “won’t pay” protests against road tolls in Greece, has been charged €21,787.20 by the Greek tax agency for his failure to pay €427.20 in tolls. Theofanou issued a defiant letter, denouncing the “mafia” government and vowing to continue resisting.
• Farmers are the latest group to organize to protest taxes in Greece, driving their tractors to Athens, blocking highways, and attacking government buildings.
• Textile businesses in Vaishali were shuttered as the textile union launched a strike against a new tax.

War Tax Resistance

• My Waging Nonviolence article, on how the War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund is a model for civil disobedience campaigns by demonstrating how to blunt the force of government deterrents, has been picked up by Truthout and OWSNe.ws.
• The POWERevolution blog has a new post about war tax resistance. Excerpt:

  If the government does not allow us the freedom to direct our taxes toward more enriching and sustainable funds, we will begin the process of taking that freedom for ourselves. We will discontinue paying taxes to the government, and instead redirect our money into a community fund that distributes our income in a way that serves all of us. As long as we continue paying for the current system in the form of taxes, we are complicit in the violence and corruption committed by it. By withdrawing our funding of it, we withdraw our consent of its actions.

• Bernard J. Berg recalls how he came out of the U.S. military doubtful that what he was doing deserved to be called “service”:

  I too served in the Navy, just before Vietnam, helping to keep the sea lanes safe for United Fruit Co. and the Dulles brothers. I later joined the war tax resistance effort sponsored by Lehigh-Pocono Committee of Concern. Money which should have gone to the IRS to pay for our war crimes went into the fund to be used for worthy causes. But the IRS had the last laugh as it garnered my bank account and got more money for illegal wars with the fines it extracted from me.

Miscellany

• I just learned about the following presentation which was made at the 2013 Bitcoin Conference, and features Angela Keaton from AntiWar.com, Carla Gericke of the Free State Project, and Teresa Warmke of Fr33Aid, discussing how nonprofits can benefit from using BitCoin:

• The number of U.S. citizens who are renouncing their citizenship is climbing, continuing a dramatic trend since 2008.

Some tabs I’ve had open in recent days…

International

• The regional government of Catalonia continues to lay down the groundwork for independence from Spain. Recently, the Diputación de Barcelona, which governs multiple municipalities in the Barcelona area, has decided to pay the taxes withheld from its nearly 5,000 employees to the Catalan regional government rather than to Spain. A number of smaller local government bodies in Catalonia had already taken this step. Currently, the Catalan regional tax agency is forwarding such payments to the Spanish government, so this is mostly symbolic, but it is meant also to allow the Catalan regional government to withhold these payments at a later date when the time seems ripe for full independence.
• In Acapulco, businesses are petitioning the government to forgive their taxes on the grounds that the government is failing utterly to provide security and so they need the cash to pay protection money to organized crime groups.
• Jewelers in India have ended their 18-day strike which had been called to protest a new excise tax on gold sales. The government has suspended collection of the charge for sixty days pending the report from a committee that was formed to look into the jewelers’ grievances. The jewelers are estimated to have lost some $4.5 billion in sales during the strike. This is the third time the government has suspended the tax in response to protests.
• When Premlata Bhansali was caught on the metro without a ticket, she said she was fed up with high-rollers getting away with corruption. She refused to pay her fine, taking a seven-day jail term instead and “spent nearly 12 hours arguing with railway officials, demanding to know why they authorities were going soft on [corrupt politician and crony capitalist Vijay] Mallya and harassing the common man.”

United States

• Americans apparently prefer Vladimir Putin to the Internal Revenue Service, but on the other hand 27% of us would be willing to get an IRS tattoo (if that would get us out of paying taxes). Almost 25% of Americans think there’s nothing wrong with earning money under the table and keeping the IRS in the dark.
• Meanwhile the number of U.S. citizens renouncing their citizenship continues to skyrocket. With all the people threatening to leave after the November elections, Mexico may find it has an incentive to build that wall after all.
• NWTRCC has caught the “divestment” bug, and is reminding activists that whether your target of choice is fossil fuel consumption, Israeli apartheid, or militarism, you can get the biggest bang for your buck by divesting from the Pentagon by refusing to pay war taxes.

The IRS keeps antagonizing Congress, and Congress keeps cutting its budget, which is great news for those of us hoping Trump turns the U.S. Government into another one of his bankrupt enterprises.

The latest chapter has the Senate digging through IRS travel records, and finding some employees living lavishly on the taxpayer dime.

Employees travelling to Washington, D.C. are permitted up to $7,099 per month on lodging alone. One spent $38,799 for a five-month stay at the Grand Hyatt; another spent $72,544 over the course of the year at the Ritz Carlton and others. One rented a $4,950 per month townhouse in Arlington, Virginia; another a $4,605 luxury apartment in Chicago.

Another employee submitted 381 days’ of travel reimbursement requests in a 365-day year.

This gives Congress another opportunity to pontificate on the side of the taxpayer, the IRS Commissioner another opportunity to express contrition, and yet… I can’t help but feel this situation suits everybody just fine. After all, similar problems were uncovered at the agency a few years ago, too, and nothing really changed then.

In other news…

• In 2014, an audit of IRS hiring practices found that 800 of the 7,000 employees the agency had rehired in the previous three years had prior conduct or performance issues when working with the agency. “In response, the agency agreed to fully consider such issues in the hiring process and Congress later enacted a law imposing that as a requirement.” The agency was recently reaudited, and… “about 200 of the some 2,000 former employees rehired in January 2015–March 2016 had such issues.” Old habits die hard.
• Erica Leigh, at NWTRCC’s blog, continues to advocate for the war tax resistance movement expanding its focus. This time she highlights divestment from the prison system as another good reason to resist taxes.
• Mary M. McGlone meditates on the “Render Unto Caesar” koan at the National Catholic Reporter, and determines that “What we owe to God is a blank check.”

Some tabs that have schlepped past my browser window in recent days:

• The University Alliance for Democracy and Justice (Coordinadora Universitaria por la Democracia y la Justicia) in Nicaragua issued a call for increased tax resistance and a general strike last week (translation mine):

  In the face of the massacre by the Ortega-Murillo government of the Nicaraguan people, from the University Alliance for Democracy and Justice we call on the private sector and to Nicaraguan society in general, to strengthen their actions of tax resistance and to stand firm in the face of state violence, declaring a general strike for 48 hours or until the Ortega-Murillo government complies with the following conditions:

  1. Stop the cruel paramilitary repression in Masaya and other territories besieged by the National Guard and Sandinista Youth shock troops.
  2. Send invitations to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the European Union, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, to establish permanent missions of these organizations in our country.

  The call is to use every civic mechanism we have at our disposal to curb these criminal acts of the Ortega-Murillo government.

  We cannot live normal lives while they massacre our brothers!

• A survey of thousands of smokers in California showed that more than a third of them had used legal methods to get around the state’s prohibitive excise tax on tobacco, and nearly one in five had used illegal techniques. And that survey was taken before a $2-per-pack hike in the tax rate took effect. “About a third of cigarettes in California are estimated to be from out-of-state (and thus tax-avoiding) sources.”
• More tales of traffic ticket issuing camera or radar boxes being destroyed: from France & Italy; Saudi Arabia, Rhode Island, and France; and France & Italy again.
• One of the features of the big tax law that Republicans passed last year was one that caps the tax deduction for state and local taxes. This has the effect of raising taxes on wealthier people from high-tax states. These tend to be the Democrat-leaning, wealthier, coastal states, and so this has been seen as partially a partisan poke at the Democrat’s donor base and a thumb-in-the-eye at blue states in general — increasing the amount they’re subsidizing their red cousins. But blue state lawmakers are getting creative and trying to deny the U.S. Treasury this extra tax money. Some of these workarounds would even have the effect of allowing people to deduct more than before.
• No surprise: IT security at the IRS is a mess. Attention hacktivists: strike while the iron is hot.
• The ranks of war tax resisters in Lleida, Catalonia have risen to about fifty. Resisters there typically redirect tax money to non-governmental organizations and then declare an equivalent tax credit on their tax returns.
• The opposition coalition in Sri Lanka urged people to stop paying taxes if the government goes through on its plans to pay compensation to former members of the Tamil Tigers insurrection.

Today I’ll share some links about tax policy and tax resistance in the United States that have caught my attention recently.

First, though: I’ve started a Wikipedia page on Tax resistance in the United States that covers how theories about tax resistance have shaped (and been shaped in) the U.S., and how tax resistance in practice has played out in the country. Wikipedia is an open, collaborative project that anyone can help to edit, so I encourage you to learn what it’s all about and how to help make it better.

Now on to the links:

Tax Evasion

• The New York Times got its hands on a trove of financial documents concerning the real estate empire of Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump’s father, and published a well-done exposé on what they found. From the point of view of today’s political squabbles and tomorrow’s history lessons, the takeaway is that Donald Trump’s brand, in which he is represented as a self-made business prodigy, is a laughable con job. From our vantage, however, what’s interesting is the extent to which the Trump family used legal, effectively-legal, and illegal methods to evade taxes. They paid a fraction of what they owed, again and again. This may help bolster the widespread feeling that rich people commonly get away with tax evasion, sticking it to the little guy. This in turn erodes “tax morale” which causes voluntary tax compliance to fall.
• Another bit of journalism hammering on this theme (though more free-wheeling and not as methodically precise) comes from GQ: “How Puerto Rico Became the Newest Tax Haven for the Super Rich”. Apparently if you can convince the IRS that you’ve become a permanent resident of the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico, you’ll find yourself in “the only place on U.S. soil where personal income from capital gains, interest, and dividends are untaxed.”

General Government Failure

• “The federal government could soon pay more in interest on its debt than it spends on the military, Medicaid or children’s programs.” Thus begins a New York Times article on the growing federal government debt. “Within a decade, more than $900 billion in interest payments will be due annually, easily outpacing spending on myriad other programs. Already the fastest-growing major government expense, the cost of interest is on track to hit $390 billion next year, nearly 50 percent more than in 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.” The more the federal government is reduced to being a collection agency for bondholders, the less mischief it can get up to elsewhere. Far from addressing this problem, today’s policymakers are exacerbating it, so we have more such headlines to look forward to.
• Alex Tabarrok and Michael Makowsky used some clever data mining to unveil that when governments make it profitable for police to arrest black and Hispanic people (through property forfeiture laws that allow police to profit from the booty they seize), such arrests increase. They conclude: “The prospects for justice are dimmed when the probability an individual is arrested varies not only by the character of their transgression but also by the potential windfall they present to the public coffer.”
• It’s hard to tell your cops from your robbers, that’s for sure. Take for instance Officer Ebony Nesbitt of the Miami-Dade police force… recently arrested for her part in raking in half a million dollars by filing false tax returns in an identity theft scam.

IRS Follies

• The National Taxpayer Advocate says that the IRS is cooking the books when they report their numbers on how their phone “customer” service is doing just fine. For one thing, they don’t measure the phone numbers with the worst service. For another, they don’t count getting tangled up in an unhelpful “press X for Y” phone menu and then hanging up in frustration as an unsuccessful call. For another, they count merely talking to an IRS operator as a successful call, whether the operator was able to resolve the problem or not.
• The Tax-Expatriation blog has gotten its hands on a letter from the U.S. State Department refusing to issue a passport to a person with what the IRS categorizes as “a seriously delinquent tax debt”.

Miscellaneous

• Republicans are prone to complain about the percentage of U.S. households who are so poor they don’t have to pay income tax (remember Mitt Romney’s revealing “47%” comments way back when? Or the Wall Street Journal’s “lucky duckies” editorials?). But that didn’t stop them from crafting their major tax legislation (the recent “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”) in such a way that it will increase the percentage of American households who pay no federal income tax. The Tax Policy Center estimates that fully 44% of American households will pay no federal income taxes at all this year (2% more than last year). About 25% will pay no payroll tax either, or their payroll tax will be offset by a refundable income tax credit.
• “Millennials” (says the New York Times) are joining together to swap techniques for quitting the rat race and retiring early, in something called “the FIRE movement.” They begin to live more frugally, squirrel things away, take greater care of their investment decisions, and eye an early modest retirement or semi-retirement. Most of the examples in the article are of pretty well-off people who really just needed to stop living at or above the lifestyle they could afford. But it’s people like them who pay the taxes, and by stepping off the treadmill, they stop doing so or at least stop doing so much. So if you know anyone in that category, send them a link.
• About ten years ago the number of Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship began to shoot up, from what had been a normal range of two to eight hundred people a year to a high of 5,409 people in 2016. But things seem to have leveled off since then. Why? Your guess is as good as mine, maybe better.

There’s a new National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee newsletter out, with content including:

• Lincoln Rice considers war tax redirection as a form of slavery reparations
• Ruth Benn examines the implications of inheritances for war tax resisters
• Tax law and policy changes:
  • lock-in letters that interfere with resisters’ who want to block paycheck withholding
  • the new W-4 forms that have come out to conform to the new tax law
  • standard deduction amounts for the 2019 tax year
  • the toll of ongoing IRS impersonation scams
  • the recent drastic collapse of IRS enforcement effort against non-filers and non-payers
• Some international news of resisters from Spain and Turkish Cyprus
• A profile of NWTRCC’s new outreach consultant, Chrissy Kirchhoefer

In other news:

• IRS employees got back to work after the “shutdown” and found that over 5,000,000 letters had piled up on their desks while they were away.
• TaxProf Blog gives a fascinating overview of the bureaucratic morass the IRS slogs through even on a good day, when it’s not shut down. There are multiple oversight bodies and committees all demanding that the agency do this or that, and obsolete laws demanding that it collect irrelevant data. It’s a wonder they can get anything done.

Recent links from hither and yon:

• Tax resistance is heating up in Myanmar in the wake of the military coup there. The national legislature passed a law suspending tax collection and ordered government departments to stop collecting taxes, though the head of the central tax agency downplayed this. There are also campaigns afoot to boycott lottery tickets, stop using sales tax stamps, and stop paying government monopoly utility bills. Consumer pressure forced one restaurant chain to make a public statement that customers were welcome to refuse to pay sales tax in its restaurants.
• You can learn more about the Extinction Rebellion U.K. project #MoneyRebellion in its latest newsletter. Among its projects is Earth Tax Strike — a coordinated tax resistance campaign designed to pressure the government to enact more sensible environmental policies. Here is an example of a letter the resisters will be sending to the government to explain their refusal and their demands.
• The IRS continues to exceed its authority by assessing “frivolous filing penalties” against people who write them letters that protest how their tax dollars are spent — even if those letters aren’t “filings” at all, or are accompanied by filings that are accurate and complete and that don’t assert any “frivolous” positions. This has understandably intimidated some people from petitioning their government for redress of grievances in this fashion. Small loss though that may be, Ruth Benn urges us to not roll over too quickly: “if we want to make a statement about refusing to pay for war, hassles come with the territory and are actually the least of the risks that a resister could face.”
• The human war on traffic ticket robots continues. In recent weeks, radar cameras were toppled or blinded by spray paint in various locations in France.
• The U.S. government has been sending out stimulus payments as direct-deposits, as checks, or as debit cards. It would do this even if the recipient was behind on their taxes and owed the goverment money: it did not deduct what you owed from the stimulus you received. If the IRS couldn’t find you, though, or didn’t think you qualified for a payment, there was a backup option: you could apply for the stimulus on your tax return. However if you did that, the IRS would treat it as any other deduction or credit, and offset it against the taxes you owed. Which put people who had to use this backup at a disadvantage… or at least it did so until recently: The IRS now says it will not offset such stimulus credits against federal tax debts.
• The IRS, after insisting that it would stick with the April 15^th tax filing deadline this year, finally threw in the towel and extended it to May 17^th. Part of what convinced them? They are still trying to finish up last year’s returns, and a growing backlog of taxpayer correspondence. There were also some significant tax changes in the recently-signed stimulus bill (such as big changes to the child tax credit, and exemption of a large hunk of unemployment benefits from taxable income) that threw a wrench into things even as tax filing season was already officially underway.

Recent links of note:

• Some more details have emerged about the Biden administration plan to beef up the IRS enforcement budget. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the administration is seeking a $1.2 billion / 10.4% total increase in the agency budget, most of which would go to tax enforcement.
• Every once in a while, the IRS crunches the numbers and tries to figure out the size of the “tax gap” — the difference between what Americans owe and what they actually cough up. The problem is that there are a lot of unknowns — unpaid taxes that the government currently has no way of knowing that it is owed. So it has to make guesses and extrapolations. Now, in testimony to a Congressional committee, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig has admitted what I’ve long suspected: the agency’s estimates of the “tax gap” have been far too low and the real number is more than double what has been reported.
• Meanwhile, the IRS is still struggling to get through its backlog of tax year 2019 income tax return filings as this year’s tax filing season hits its peak. This is further complicated this year by the agency’s role in administering a new stimulus check dispersal, and last-minute retroactive changes to the tax laws that made some already-filed returns incorrect and that gave the agency responsibility for rolling out a new tax credit.
• United for Peace & Justice highlights how war tax resisters are organizing for this year’s tax season.
• Sojourners highlights Christian war tax resisters.
• Cartoonist Peter Bagge examines the life of Henry David Thoreau at Reason.
• The war tax resistance season has also begun in Spain.
• More traffic ticket robots are disabled by rebels in France, Italy, and Germany.

Today is International Conscientious Objection Day, honoring those who refuse to participate in their governments’ war-making institutions. It comes a couple of days before this year’s delayed income tax-filing deadline in the United States, and so conscientious objectors to military taxation are appropriately in the news:

• The Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters of Vermont are gathering to talk shop.

  “I want to live my values, which includes nonviolence,” said Lindsey Britt of Brattleboro. “Paying for destruction at home and abroad doesn’t fit into that, so I live more simply and refuse to pay a portion of my taxes.”

• War tax resister Sue Barnhart has a letter-to-the-editor in the Eugene Weekly. Excerpt:

  I have been a war tax resister since the 1970s since I do not want my money supporting murder. The money I resist to the military I give to local groups that actually help people and the environment. Now I am also a war tax resister because I don’t want my money supporting the biggest contributor to the burning of our planet: the U.S. military.

• War tax resisters Lincoln Rice and Robin Brookes are hosting a discussion group at the upcoming World Beyond War #NoWar2021 conference on on June 4^th: “War Tax Resistance: Tax resistance to paying for the military began hundreds of years ago and continues to this day. Let’s talk about the practicality and efficacy of refusing to pay for war.”

In other news:

• People in Myanmar are standing up to the military junta there by refusing to pay taxes and government-monopoly utility bills.

  “I’ve decided I won’t pay any tax to the dictators, and that includes electricity. If police and soldiers ask me, I’ll just tell them I don’t have any money. I don’t care if they cut off the power to my house,” the resident of Yangon’s North Dagon Township told Frontier. “Most people in my ward who I’ve spoken to say they’re not going to pay either.”

  The Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar apparently has a lot of support from within the Ministry of Electricity and Energy, which may make things easier on resisters.

  Ko Aung Thu, who lives in the Shwe Lin Ban area of the highly industrialised township, said he had received a bill for January but had no intention of paying.

  “They killed people right here, in this township,” he said, referring to the security forces’ massacre of more than 50 people on March 14. “Why should I pay money to a bunch of murderers? I won’t pay any taxes. If we pay taxes, we’re just supporting murderers.”

  A hotel owner in nearby Bagan said he wouldn’t pay either and he expected many others would also refuse.

  “I just heard today about how the state lottery isn’t able to run because so few people bought tickets. I think most people won’t pay their electricity bills, either,” he said. “We won’t support the dictator… the income from electricity charges is huge and they won’t be able to survive without that money.”

• In this year’s Lambeth Readers and Writers Festival, author Simon Hannah hosted an online talk called “Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Fight to Stop the Poll Tax.”
• U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is spearheading a Democratic Party effort to expand and further empower the IRS. “I have proposed nearly doubling the funding for the IRS but also making a chunk of their funding mandatory and targeted toward high-income individuals and corporations.”
• But right now, one of the things that’s disempowering the agency is… poorly-maintained office equipment.

  During site visits to two processing centers, management estimated that 42 percent of 164 devices used by the submission processing functions are unusable and others are broken but still functioning. “IRS employees stated that the only reason they could not use many of these devices is because they are out of ink or because the waste cartridge container is full,” it said.

  The report added: “The lack of working printers and copiers affects many different areas of the IRS but has an especially significant effect on the return and income verification services functions” where employees must make copies of tax returns to fulfill requests for tax documents from taxpayers and other institutions. At one center, though, only three of the 10 devices were working.

• The human war on traffic ticket robot cameras continues, with the robots taking casualties in Guadeloupe and France and in Italy in recent weeks.

Some tax resistance links from hither and yon:

• The Greenfield Recorder features an article about anti-war activist Randy Kehler. Excerpt:

  At age 77, the soft-spoken Kehler is still inspiring nonviolent anti-war activism. Locally, he and his wife of 45 years, Betsy Corner, are possibly most remembered for their stand against the Internal Revenue Service, as “war tax-resisters” whose rural Colrain home was seized for non-payment of taxes in 1991 and sold by the IRS for $5,400.

• The Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action’s newsletter includes an interview with war tax resister Kathy Kelly and an article about war tax resistance by Lincoln Rice and Glen Milner.
• Richard M. Schickel, a former IRS Revenue Officer, has put out a new book: Why The IRS Doesn’t Work Anymore: An Insider’s Guide to the Agency. It airs the dirty laundry at the IRS that the agency tries to distract you from with their rah-rah glossy reports.
• Bloomberg Businessweek has an article about IRS “customer” service and how awful it is.

  Its customer service workforce has shrunk more than 40% since 2010, according to the most recent data, and the agency is struggling to fill vacancies amid a labor shortage — handcuffed by a federal pay scale that starts college graduates at little more than fast-food wages.

  It’s so bad, that tax professionals can’t even reach the agency on the special back-channel line designed just for them. One person’s hopeless bureaucratic dysfunction is another person’s opportunity: A company has launched a $100/month service “that makes robocalls to the agency’s special practitioner line… waits on hold, and then, when it makes a connection, puts the client through to an IRS agent.”
• The human war on traffic ticket camera robots continues. In France and Italy, fire and spray paint took out several cameras, while Santa Claus converted another one into a pose-with-Santa photo booth. Spray paint was also the weapon of choice in several attacks in France and Germany in recent weeks.

  

Recent links of note:

• The Catalan independence group Assemblea Nacional Catalana asked the Generalitat de Catalunya to give formal legal protection to taxpayers who send their taxes to the Catalan regional government rather than to the Spanish central government. Currently, the Catalan tax agency forwards such payments to the Spanish government, so resisters who pay their taxes to Catalonia instead of Spain are engaging in a mostly-symbolic action. But separatists hope that the Catalan government at some point could end such forwarding, or threaten to do so, as a tactic to further the cause of independence.
• The military junta in Myanmar is sending soldiers door to door to threaten to kill resisters who have been refusing to pay government bills.

  Myanmar’s shadow Opposition government, the National Unity Government, has urged the public to stop paying for electricity. In September, it said that 97 percent of people in Mandalay and 98 percent in Yangon had done so, costing the regime $1 billion by that point.

• For a while now, U.S. taxpayers have been able to access some of their tax records held by the IRS via the agency’s on-line portal. This required a somewhat onerous process of signing up for an account — a process that’s a bit more invasive and difficult than signing up for a similar account at your bank. I’ve tried to talk a few war tax resisters through the process because it can be useful to have better visibility into what information the IRS is assembling about you. But often, they throw up their hands at some point and say it’s not worth it, because it really does seem like more trouble than it ought to be.

  Apparently it wasn’t nearly awful enough yet. “We’re bringing you an improved sign-in experience,” says the agency. Improved how? Read it and weep.

  The agency says that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me, an online identity verification service that requires applicants to submit copies of bills and identity documents, as well as a live video feed of their faces via a mobile device.

  [C]ompleting the process requires submitting at least two secondary identification documents, such as as a Social Security card, a birth certificate, health insurance card, W-2 form, electric bill, or financial institution statement.

  After re-uploading all of this information, ID.me’s system prompted me to “Please stay on this screen to join video call.” However, the estimated wait time when that message first popped up said “3 hours and 27 minutes.”

• The income of “closely-held businesses” (Schedule C / pass-through / non-corporately structured) in the United States is taxed at special rates and with special rules, but on the owners’ individual tax returns. A new report from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center says that these special rules, combined with some clever gaming of the rules and some outright noncompliance, mean that about half of that income goes completely untaxed.
• More traffic ticket radar robots fell to gunfire, paint, and fire in the ongoing human rebellion, in New York, Kazakhstan, France, Germany, and Italy, in recent weeks.
• The latest encouraging trend: clever children as young as nine years old launching distributed denial of service attacks against the computer networks of the schools that institutionalize them.

  One theory is that youngsters can fall into denial-of-service attacks by firstly playing online games, and then falling into installing mods, hacks, and even remote access trojans to get the upperhand on their gaming rivals.

Your up-to-the-minute tax resistance news:

• The IRS is giving off a powerful odor of desperation as it enters tax filing season. The agency has a backlog of some fourteen million unprocessed tax returns and other taxpayer correspondence from previous years still to get through. Some taxpayers have complained of getting upsetting notices that the agency had no record of them filing their taxes last year, when in fact their tax return is still sitting in this gigantic pile (or has been lost in the shuffle). Members of Congress, smelling blood in the water, signed a letter demanding that the IRS stop harassing taxpayers in this way. (Memo to Congress: you don’t have to resort to pleading in a letter; the IRS is part of the federal government and you could pass legislation to fix this if you really meant it.) The agency responded by suspending some such taxpayer notices but also noting that by law, if they don’t send certain notices out, they lose the ability to pursue people who actually did fail (or refuse) to file. Meanwhile, the agency is shifting 1,200 employees from their regular duties (like enforcement) to doing data entry so as to try to whittle down this backlog.
• Florida Man is back in the news, this time for using IRS databases to download people’s past tax returns and then filing additional fake returns in their names in order to get fraudulent refunds.

• That sort of identity theft and refund fraud has made the IRS eager to tighten up security. They’re under pressure to allow taxpayers to conveniently view their tax statements and other such information on-line in the same way they have come to expect to view their bank accounts, utility bills, and everything else in our digital age. On the other hand, cunning and not-so-cunning fraudsters like Florida Man see such convenient access as a recklessly-guarded vault full of government money ripe for the picking. What is the IRS to do?

  Their response was to invite the usual suspects in government contracting to bid on a contract to square the circle and make the problem go away. The winning bidder apparently was military contractor ID.me, and the IRS has begun rolling out their solution and telling users of on-line IRS account services that they’ll need to reenroll with ID.me if they want to continue to access their accounts. However, the rollout has gone poorly. As I noted last month the sign-up process is clumsy, time-consuming, and buggy. It’s also uncomfortably invasive — requiring a face scan and copies of a variety of documents. ID.me sent out a press release claiming that those face scans were only used in a very limited way to verify identity but then had to walk back that claim when it was shown to be untrue. Privacy advocates and people & groups with a host of other concerns have been urging the IRS to reconsider.

• Lincoln Rice, who heads the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC), was interviewed on the Tax Chats podcast.
• Danny Burns’s excellent history of the Poll Tax Rebellion has been released in free text and PDF forms on-line, apparently with the blessing of the author.
• There’s a new NWTRCC newsletter out.

• As I noted late last year, the number of Americans who renounced their citizenship hit new highs again. But that’s not the whole story. As it turns out, in order to renounce your citizenship, you first have to appear in person at an embassy or consulate for an “exit interview.” And, with the covid epidemic as an excuse, these offices have been refusing to grant such interviews, meaning that thousands of Americans who would like to formally renounce their citizenship have been prohibited from doing so.

  Clarification: the number of Americans who renounced their citizenship hit new highs in 2020, according to numbers released last year, but it looks like last year’s numbers dropped considerably from there, with the unwillingness of embassies to process renunciations being one reason for the drop. ―♇ 6 February 2022

• The ragtag human guerrilla war against the robot traffic ticket hordes continues, with humans taking robots out of action in the United States, France, Martinique, and Italy and in the United States, Italy, New Zealand, and France in recent weeks.

Just when I think I’ve heard it all about the troubles at the IRS, everything turns out to be worse than I heard:

• Remember a few weeks ago when I told you about how the IRS was rolling out a new way for people to sign on to their on-line systems, and that it was a bit invasive, difficult, and buggy? And then remember last week when I told you how the rollout was going poorly and generating a lot of push-back? Well, the awful just continues to pile up and now the IRS is scrapping the new sign-on process and going back to the drawing board. Meanwhile, some seven million people may have tried to use the new process to log in, a process that included sending in “selfies” for biometric testing, which attracted the ire of privacy advocates. The contractor who designed and operated the identification verification service says these people can request to have these selfies deleted. Reading between the lines, I think this contractor is going to try to force everybody to use the back-up plan that was already in place for if the automatic selfie-check didn’t work: to have a video chat with an employee who would “eyeball” the chatter to see if their identity matches up with what’s on their paperwork. This isn’t really any less invasive than the selfie method, but maybe it triggers people’s “big brother” alarms less. It’ll certainly be less automated and therefore more expensive and time-consuming.
• But the IRS is no stranger to doing things the more expensive and time-consuming way. For example, their mail-sorting and -opening machines have been broken for a long time, and IRS employees now have to do the work by hand. This means that if you send them a check, it takes them longer than it should for them to get that check out of the envelope and into the U.S. Treasury. This delay also means the government loses out on interest they could be earning on that money. How much interest? About $165 million a year. It would only cost $650,000 to buy completely new machines, or $365,000 to repair the broken ones.
• And remember how last week I told you how the IRS had stopped sending out some enforcement notices to taxpayers? Taxpayers were getting frightening notices suggesting that the IRS didn’t think they’d filed their taxes, when in fact their tax returns were sitting in an enormous pile of tax returns the agency hadn’t gotten around to processing yet. So the IRS said it would stop sending out a few types of notice until it got all that sorted out — but said that it couldn’t stop sending out a bunch of others because it might mean they’d lose their chance to go after genuine tax scofflaws. Well, now they’ve thrown in the towel and said they’ll stop sending out a dozen more types of notices including the balance due, balance due second notice, notice of intent to levy, and withholding compliance letters that are standard issue to tax resisters like myself.
• And remember how last week I told you that the IRS had a backlog of some 14 million unprocessed tax returns and other taxpayer correspondence? Turns out it’s more like 24 million. Meanwhile: “The agency sought to fill 5,000 positions for several campuses across the country in time for this tax season but was able to hire fewer than 200.”
• In other news, the IRS is eager to reduce the size of the underground economy by demanding more reports on gig workers and others who get irregular payments through platforms like Paypal, Venmo, Etsy, and Zelle. But this isn’t going smoothly either. It seems to be raising more resentment than tax money, at least so far. And it’s easy to bypass. If you pay someone using one of these platforms and explicitly say you’re paying for goods or services, maybe it’ll eventually get reported as income. But if you don’t say this, as far as the platform is concerned maybe you’re just sending a gift or reimbursing someone for part of a meal you shared where they picked up the tab. Is today’s IRS going to send auditors out to make sure nothing falls through the cracks this way? Yeah sure.

In other news:

• The tax strike against the Edmonton Incinerator continues to attract more strikers as the early adopters prepare for their first day in court.
• Turkish opposition politician Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu announced that he plans to refuse to pay his utility bills until president Erdoğan withdraws 50% price hikes instituted at the beginning of the year. Some Alevist cemevis have also stopped paying.
• The ragtag human guerrilla war against the traffic ticket robots continues, with robots succumbing to human attacks or being frustrated by human ingenuity in the U.K., Australia, Brazil, Italy, and France in recent weeks.

Some links from hither and yon:

• A CoinDesk article on cryptocurrency highlights how tax resisters helped popularize bitcoin: “How Tax Protesters Set Off the Bitcoin Revolution”
• The NWTRCC blog has had a couple of recent articles on “symbolic” tax resistance:
  • Symbolic Tax Resistance by Rick & Carolyn Yoder
  • I Am a Symbolic Resister by Shirley Whiteside
• Scrappy ragtag bands of human rebels continue to inflict casualties on the traffic ticket robot hordes, with recent attacks taking out robot cameras in France, Italy, & Germany, Italy & France, and the U.S., France, & Italy in recent weeks.
• Anabaptist World features a letter from Harold A. Penner urging Mennonites to redirect their war taxes to the Mennonite Church USA Peace Tax Fund.

And here is some more news about the ongoing troubles at the IRS.

• This CNN Business story goes in some depth into how a loose coalition of activists forced the IRS into an embarrassing and costly retreat from its plan to use facial recognition technology to verify the identity of taxpayers using its online account portal.
• This note from the National Taxpayer Advocate gives more details about the IRS plan to stop issuing certain enforcement action notices while it tries to deal with the enormous backlog of unprocessed returns and other correspondence. For example: “If a taxpayer’s account has been assigned to one of the IRS’s automated levy programs (ALPs), the IRS is also suspending the levies made by those programs…” The agency will also not be able to pursue many new levies because in order to do so, it must first send the taxpayer a letter informing them of their right to request a Collection Due Process hearing, and they’ve temporarily stopped the automatic sending of those letters.
• The New York Times took a dive into the woes at the IRS: “Decades of Neglect Leave I.R.S. in Tax Season ‘Chaos’.”
• Politico did the same: “ ‘They went down hard’: IRS’ tax season woes rooted in pandemic, long funding slide.” Excerpt:

  Some 53,000 IRS employees are still on remote work — about two-thirds of the agency’s workforce, which an IRS spokesperson characterized as “a maximized telework posture.”

  But privacy rules prevent remote processing of the millions of paper tax returns mailed to the IRS, as well as the examination of returns with discrepancies from IRS records, the issuance of refunds and dealing with other taxpayer mail.

• The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University issued a report showing that the IRS audits the poorest American households at five times the rate as the rest. This seems to be an effect of the agency’s plummeting rate of audits of the well-to-do combined with its increasing use of cheap-and-easy “correspondence audits” against low-income taxpayers who apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit. As the National Taxpayer Advocate puts it:

  The IRS correspondence audit process is structured to expend the least amount of resources to conduct the largest number of examinations — resulting in the lowest level of customer service to taxpayers having the greatest need for assistance.

• Last Summer, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a spending bill that would have boosted the IRS budget. That bill got bogged down in Congress before anything could come of it. A recent appropriations bill resurrected the IRS budget boost, but pared it way back, so now the agency budget will only rise by 6%. These days that’s hardly enough to keep up with inflation. And the appropriations bill restricts how various parts of the increase can be spent, so some parts of the agency budget — tax enforcement for example — will see even smaller increases.

Some tabs that have slid across my browser in recent days:

• The IRS is not making as much progress as it promised on its backlog of tax returns from past years and it abruptly abandoned plans to increase mandatory reporting of smaller transactions on platforms like Venmo and PayPal. This confirms to me that the agency is still struggling and is going to take a lot of time to turn its newly increased budget into competence and capacity.
• NWTRCC has a new newsletter out. It includes some news on new U.S. tax policies and official actions and their implications for war tax resisters, and some recaps of the recent 40^th anniversary gathering of the organization.
• War tax resister Karl Meyer was interviewed on Northern Spirit Radio.
• John LaForge explains why he’s refusing to pay the fine imposed on him by a German court after he trespassed at nuclear weapons sites.

  One reason is because my protest was not wrong or a mistake in any sense, whereas paying the fine implies I’m guilty of some sort of offense or misconduct. Further, agreeing to pay has the appearance of an apology or remorse on my part when none is warranted. I believe any nonviolent action against preparations to commit mass destruction with nuclear weapons is in the public interest. Further, my so-called “trespass” was an attempt at crime prevention, or interference with ongoing government criminality, and as such was a civic duty.

• The ragtag human rebel forces continue their global campaign against the relentless traffic ticket robot cameras. Someone smashed a camera van in New South Wales, motorcyclists taped bags over nearly every camera on the ring road in Tolouse and Caen, cameras were disabled in Walldorf, Hunfeld, Llandrindod Wells, and Telford, othes were burned, disorientated, and painted blind in various parts of Europe.
• When the IRS won a big one-time budget bonus recently, there was some speculation that Congress would claw some of it back by cutting the agency’s annual budget. Sure enough, the recently passed omnibus package cut the IRS allocation by about 2.2%. Expect more of this when the Republicans take over the House of Representatives next year.