Tax Protestors, Witch Doctors, and the IRS
One of my goals with this website is to warn people against scams, or worse, dedicated suicidal nonsense, that can destroy their lives.
One of these high-risk sinkholes of futility is the tax protest movement. These people do not simply protest income taxes; they adopt weird strategies to justify the refusal to pay the IRS. They think they can find obscure interpretations of words in the IRS code, and thereby escape the obligation of paying taxes.
Lawyers and accountants of the super-rich find ways of avoiding payment, but they file income tax forms. They minimize their clients' payments, but they do not subject their clients to the risk of jail.
In contrast is the tax protest movement, which used to call itself the patriot movement. It is made up of people who do not have much money. They pretend that they can successfully serve as their own lawyers. They pretend they don't have to pay the IRS. They pretend that simple people using convoluted arguments that nobody can follow can escape the IRS. They pretend that they can persuade a jury of their peers.
The jury is always made up of people who pay their taxes, and who basically resent the idea that anybody else can avoid paying the taxes that they have to pay. In any case, a protester has to pay his taxes for him to get in front of a jury. Before this, his case will be decided by someone within the IRS. After the taxpayer pays what he owes, he is then entitled to a jury trial to get it back.
The case laws of the IRS are not governed by common law. They are governed by Napoleonic law. You are guilty until proven innocent. The IRS can assess whatever it says you owe, and then you have to prove through your records that you do not owe it. If you do not prove it, you must pay.
THE NO-TAX GURU AS WITCH DOCTOR
From time to time, I get a letter from some well-meaning future victim who says that he has discovered a guru who has found a secret way out of paying federal taxes. The guru has adopted some arcane interpretation of words in the IRS code. This is basically a form of word magic. These people are not gurus; they are witch doctors. If you want to understand how they operate, think of being in a jungle. You wander through the jungle, lost, and stumble upon an open area, where a man dressed in peculiar garb is dancing wildly around a fire. Around him are natives dressed in loincloths.
Would you trust your financial future to this witch doctor?
There is a website devoted to detailed exposés of these tax-protesting gurus. The articles on the site provide summaries of the legal cases against them. You can find out how many of them served jail time. A lot of them have. The site is here: http://tpgurus.wikidot.com. You can look up any "don't file" guru.
Here is the case study for Peter Hendrickson. Read this study, or at least skim over it. Think of yourself in a courtroom trying to defend yourself, based on the teachings of Mr. Hendrickson. Think of the opposing lawyer, who begins to share with the jury some of the information in this summary of Mr. Hendrickson's background. He is a two-time convicted felon. He has spent a lot of years in jail. So have his followers.
Think of going to your wife and explaining to her that you want her to sign the IRS tax forms, as recommended by Mr. Hendrickson. Let her read the summary of the success which Mr. Hendrickson and his wife have had over the years by means of his interpretations of the IRS tax code. Let her get some sense of what her family is going to go through if she signs the forms.
Recently, I received this email.
I disagree with you that the American people acquiesce in the outrageous, illegal overreach of the federal government. They just don't know what to do about it. If your choice is vote democrat or republican you have no choice.I agree with you and the other writers on the Rockwell site that the only solution is to defund the Feds.
The best and I think the only way to do that is with the method of Pete Hendrickson. I believe he has the constitution, law and IRS code on his side and probably 10,000 people or more have used it with 1000 posting their returns and correspondence with the IRS on-line on his site.
It will take some of your valuable time and if you don't have it to give perhaps you have a trusted colleague that can do it. This issue merits the attention of the Rockwell group and I don't understand why it gets no attention. Unless the people that are screaming for action don't really want it.
Every time I receive a letter like this, I always do the same thing. I send an inquiry back to the individual asking him how long he has not filed. I know the answer. The people who send these letters have never actually followed the instructions of the guru. If they had, they would not send the letters, because they would either be in prison or else they would have found out how well the guru's advice works. Perhaps they are on parole. Maybe they got time off for good behavior.
The individual evaded my question. He would not say what he had done personally with respect to this information.
A FANTASY WORLD
These people live in a fantasy world. They think that there is a way to escape the federal government by means of word magic. They heard someone tell them that there is a witch doctor who dances quite well, and who utters remarkable incantations. They don't have the courage, meaning the lack of sense, to do with the guru recommends. Maybe they are willing, but their wives are not. Their wives understand what is at stake.
But they send me letters, insisting that their guru has found the magic incantation, and the federal government will soon go away, empty-handed, because hundred million American households will find out about the gurus incantations, and will no longer pay any taxes. They really do believe this. That's the sad thing. They have skirted at the borders of insanity, and from time to time, they stick a foot into the inner circle of the clearing where the witch doctor is dancing. They pull their foot out rapidly, but they pretend that in some way they are immune.
In American history, a shaman-guru convinced members of the Sioux tribe that he had ghost shirts. Bullets could not penetrate them, he said. Members wore these shirts into battle. The guru was wrong.
My advice is clear: stay away from ghost shirts and their judicial equivalents.