Tax Protesters

As mentioned in Why Do We Pay Taxes, tax protesters are people who willingly fail to pay their taxes due to one or more arguments. There are a variety of tax protester arguments, which include constitutional, statutory, conspiracy, and other arguments. Let me be very clear that none of the following arguments have been recognized by the courts and that willingly failing to pay your taxes is a federal crime.

Tax Protester Constitutional Arguments:

  1. The main constitutional argument against the income tax is that the 16th Amendment was improperly ratified. They argue that the text ratified by different state legislatures were different from the text proposed by Congress. There were differences in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation marks.
  2. Other protesters argue that Ohio was not recognized as a State by Congress until 1953, that it could not have ratified the 16th Amendment in 1913 and that the Amendment was not properly ratified.
  3. One of the more popular constitutional argument against the federal income tax is that filing a tax return can be self-incriminating. The argument is that by filing a tax return, you are potentially self-incriminating yourself, something which the 5th Amendment protects you from doing. The IRS requires you to maintain records to prove your deductions. This means that you are potentially incriminating yourself if you are ever audited. In addition, if you are audited by the IRS, you are assumed to be guilty until proven innocent, because you have to prove that your deductions are legal. However, even this argument has been rejected by the courts.

Tax Protester Statutory Arguments:

  1. Tax protesters argue that “state” is defined by the Internal Revenue Code as being a “special definition of ‘state’” and does not include the 50 states. They argue that the federal government can only legally impose an income tax on federal territories such as Washington DC, Puerto Rico, military bases, etc.
  2. An amusing argument put forth by tax protesters is that the income tax is “voluntary.” This is based on a misconstrued interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling Flora v. United States.
  3. Some tax protesters make the argument that the IRS is not a governmental agency and therefore cannot collect taxes. They come to this conclusiong because the IRS was not created by statute and also because the IRS cannot sue or be sued. There is, however, substantial proof proving that the IRS is in fact a governmental agency.

Tax Protester Conspiracy Arguments:

These are some of the silliest arguments against taxes, but they are made frequently.

  1. Tax protesters will argue that some event in US history (Civil War, Depression, etc) actually caused the Union to cease to exist and there is therefore no legal government in existance to legally collect taxes.
  2. Some believe that America never gained independence from Great Britain and is still under British control, therefore we are being taxed without representation.
  3. Another conspiracy theory is that we cannot be taxed because our dollar bills are not real “money.” They argue that the Constitution only recognized “coin money” (gold and silver) and our fiat currency is not legitimate.

Other Tax Protester Argument:

An interesting argument made by tax protesters is that the income tax is enforced by threat of imprisonment. This would make the federal government guilty of extortion against all taxpayers. Like all the other tax protester arguments, this one has been summarily rejected by the courts. However, tax protesters who do make this argument offer an alternative. They are supportive of the FairTax initiative. We discuss this interesting proposal in our FairTax article.

Having gone over some of the more popular tax protester arguments, let me just reiterate that the courts have rejected ALL of these arguments. I do NOT RECOMMEND that you use any of these arguments in order to avoid paying taxes.