IRS Finally Defends Itself

On several occasions over the past 15+ years, I have expressed my frustration, as well as that of other tax practitioners, in our attempts to counter the arguments of the growing number of tax protestors. I have long had the very distasteful feeling of doing the IRS's job for them because they took the approach that to respond to the bogus claims would in some way raise their respectability. For all of these years, I have been pleading with IRS that they were completely wrong in that strategy. Advocates of the idiotic tax protestor schemes were using the IRS's silence as a sign that IRS agrees with them. IRS officials didn't seem to understand that in our society, silence signifies agreement.

With the exponential growth of tax protestor groups via the Internet, IRS officials have just now finally come to their senses and issued a 25 page formal document countering practically all of the tax protestor arguments being bandied about. It's in PDF format and can be downloaded here. Besides the debunking of the bogus theories, as I have done on several occasions myself, they cite several court decisions where proponents of those arguments lost and were often sent to the slammer, as additional incentive to pay attention.

I hope this finally takes the wind out of the sails of the scamming tax protestors and allows us to get back to fighting the screwed up tax system through legitimate means.

KMK
- posted by Kerry M. Kerstetter, MBA~CPA~ATP~ATA @ 8/10/2001 08:53:00 PM Send this post: