|
by Frederick Mann
Some legal arguments used by those who insist on
exercising their Fiscal Freedom have been repeatedly ruled against in court. Other
arguments have a "winning record." It's very important that you know which is
which.
Disclaimer: FWO/TLH does not challenge or
threaten the authority of any legitimate government. This information constitutes only the
communication of information in accordance with the right to free speech. It does not
constitute accounting, tax, or legal advice. Anyone seeking such advice should consult a
competent professional. READERS ARE PARTICULARLY URGED TO OBEY ALL LAWS.
Introduction
Some legal arguments used by those who insist on exercising
their Fiscal Freedom have been repeatedly ruled against in court. Other arguments have a
"winning record." It's very important that you know which is which.
In '#TL05F: How to Defend Your
Freedom' I demarcated "five lines of defense":
1. Organize your life and affairs so you're an unlikely
target...;
2. The ability to defend yourself when you're "pulled over";
3. The ability to handle threatening letters;
3a. Defending against the IRS;
4. The ability to defend yourself in court;
5. The ability to defend yourself in jail.
In dealing with the IRS, the ideal is that you never have
to communicate with them and they never communicate with you. If you cannot achieve this,
then second best is that you occasionally receive threatening letters from them, and you
respond to each letter in such a way that they eventually decide to give up on you so they
can concentrat on "easier marks."
If in your correspondence with the IRS you use arguments
that have been repeatedly ruled against in court, they may decide that you're an
"easy mark" and take you to court to "skin" you.
On the other hand, if you use "winning
arguments," at some point they'll most likely do a cost/benefit analysis and decide
that it's not worth investing more of their resources in your case. (They have limited
resources.)
"Not selected to be worked operationally
because of low potential tax yield."
Go to "Individual Tax Statistics
- Nonfilers". (You need Adobe Acrobat Reader for this -- free at the Adobe website.)
Click on file "93NF01RP.PDF" and scroll down to page 2 where you'll find:
"(3) Repeaters not in inventory:
Those who had not filed their TY 1993 income tax return as of August 1995, but were not
selected to be worked operationally because of low potential tax yield.
(4) Repeaters in inventory: Those who had
not filed their TY 1993 return as of August 1995, have been selected for the Nonfiler Case
Major File, assigned a "select code," and are in inventory to be worked."
("To be worked or not to be worked?" that is the
question!)
Dead Issues and Destroyed Arguments
You may want to peruse the following:
Key Issue #1 - Mandatory or Voluntary?
(I personally wouldn't use this argument in correspondence
with the IRS because there's some case law against it -- see 'Destroyed Arguments' above.)
Key Issue #2 - Reliance Defense
Key Issue #3 - Good Faith (Cheek vs. US)
- If you believe in good faith that you don't owe anything and
don't have to file or pay, then there's no criminal intent, making it difficult for the
"willful failure to file" charge to "stick." See Chapter 7 of Rape of America.
Key Issue #4 - The Fifth Amendment
(If an IRS Agent were to demand or request information from you, you could indicate your willingness to provide any legally required information, subject to your being granted complete immunity against both civil and criminal proceedings. You could also require that the Agent establish that: (a) The law or regulation under which the request or demand was being made applied to you personally; and (b) The Agent had jurisdiction and authority (Key Issue #8) to make the request or demand.)
Key Issue #5 - Taxpayer or Nontaxpayer - Who Decides?
(If properly used, this could be one of the strongest arguments of all. If an IRS Agent were to send you a letter in which you are referred to as a "taxpayer," you could ask on what basis this determination was made. If you had been a taxpayer in the past, you could explain that you had since studied the law, consulted a number of qualified professionals, and made a determination that you were no longer a taxpayer. To demonstrate your good faith you could explain that if a properly qualified and authorized IRS Agent were to make a valid and legal determination that you are a taxpayer, you
would accept that. To succeed with this approach you may require expert assistance.)
Key Issue #6 - Void for Vagueness?
Key Issue #7 - Creation of the IRS
One letterhead reads "US Department of Justice."
Another reads "Internal Revenue Service, Department of the Treasury." Why no
"US" in the second case? Are these people imposters? See the letter from William J. Benson
regarding the creation of the IRS.
(If you were to receive a demand letter, particularly an unsigned computer-printed form, from the "Internal Revenue Service, Department of the Treasury," you could treat it as an invalid commercial instrument and return it within three business days -- see '#TL16I: Refusal For Cause Without Dishonor - U.C.C. 3-501'. This report refers to The Sovereigncy Package which includes numerous examples of using "refusal for cause" effectively.)
Key Issue #8 - Does the IRS Officer Have Delegated Authority?
(This indicates a very powerful tactic: "Mr. IRS
Agent, before you do anything you need to establish that you have proper jurisdiction and
authority.)
Key Issue #9 - Bill of Particulars
Key Issue #10 - Do Judges Have to Uphold, Support,
or Defend the Constitution?
(There's a fairly common misconception that judges are
supposed to obey the Constitution. That's not how the system works in practice. In
accordance with the doctrine of "judicial review," judges routinely
"interpret" (or distort) the Constitution. Collectively, these
"interpretations" constitute case law. Although I haven't personally done this,
I bet dollars to doughnuts, that if anyone were to count the instances of judges citing
the Constitution compared to the instances they cite case law, the latter would win by a
margin of more than ten to one! For most practical purposes, Constitutional arguments and
defenses are bigtime losers when there's contrary case law.)
Key Issue #11 - Protecting Your Income & Assets
If you decide to "buck the IRS," one of their
favorite ways of retaliating is to seize any of your assets they can get hold of. If you
own a home, they may place a lien on it. They may even evict you from your home and sell
it. If you have a bank account, they may issue a "Notice of Lien" and the bank
will most likely give your money to the IRS. If you earn a salary, the IRS may garnish
your wages and your employer is likely to cooperate with the IRS. Illegality of IRS
actions (or actions by banks and employers), or the manner in which they are taken, will
not prevent the IRS from seizing whatever of your assets they can find. From their point
of view, if you buck them, you need to be terrorized and destroyed -- to serve as an
example -- and, of course, they want to steal from you as much as they can. They also want
to render you powerless to defend yourself.
However, if they can't find any assets or income, you most
likely will be classified as "not selected to be worked operationally because of low
potential tax yield."
Whether or not you decide to "buck the IRS" --
even if you "dutifully" file your confessions and pay the ransom -- they may
still select you "to be worked" and "taken to the cleaners." This has
happened to many people. They may even decide to kill you. Check out the following:
It is therefore prudent and wise to organize your life and
affairs so your income and assets are as invisible as possible and as difficult to seize
or steal by IRS and other marauders, see:
Key Issue #12 - Individual Master File (IMF)
A subscriber posted this to one of our lists:
"I can tell you though, that from a personal point of view, it was very educational for me to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the IRS for my Individual Master File (IMF). I also filed a FOIA request for the IRS master code book. I then used the code book to decode my IMF. I discovered that one of the things the many lines of seemingly jumbled alpha-numeric characters on my IMF said was: "not required to mail a return." Now, I had already arrived at that same conclusion after spending a great deal of time carefully studying the Internal Revenue Code, the U.S. Constitution, U.S. Supreme Court decisions and various Internal Revenue Service publications, documents and forms."
Information on FOIA requests to the IRS can be found at:
Information on decoding IMFs can be found at:
Conclusion
The above should give you a good idea of what to do and
what not to do, what to rely on and what not to rely on.
Feedback: What did you think of this article? We'd like to hear your thoughts. (Please mention the name of the article to which you are responding.) |
