- "We're confiscating property now. That's socialism."
- Former Revenue Chief
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- Editor's note: Brought about by the successful hunger
strike of tax activist Bob Schulz, an historic meeting between the federal
government and leaders of the "tax honesty movement" will take
place in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 25 and 26. WorldNetDaily will be there
to cover the proceedings.
-
- Leading up to this high-profile confrontation over the
legality of the income tax, the following is the second in a series of
reports discussing an internal document from the Internal Revenue Service's
own website. The document is intended to guide the agency's employees in
how to deal with what the IRS calls "frivolous tax arguments."
Part 1, "IRS bashes 'frivolous tax arguments," was published
in Tuesday's WorldNetDaily.
-
-
- By Jon Dougherty © 2001
WorldNetDaily.com
8-22-1
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- Tax experts, including one who spent a year researching
whether enough states properly ratified the 16th Amendment which authorizes
Congress to collect income taxes -- are as insistent as ever that Americans
are not mandated to pay Uncle Sam a portion of what they earn every year.
-
- "I've read all of the cases the IRS mentions"
in its 25-page document entitled "The Truth About Frivolous Tax Arguments,"
said Bill Benson, author of "The Law That Never Was," a book
many believe debunks the government's claim that the income tax is legal
and that the IRS is a properly authorized government agency.
-
- Very simply, he says there is no actual law authorizing
an income tax.
-
- "They must have a law in order to have any of this
[the income tax] to apply," Benson told WND. "They must have
a law from its inception, and they don't have that."
-
- A former criminal investigator for the Illinois Department
of Revenue for nearly a decade, Benson said he has "17,000 certified
and notarized documents showing that the 16th Amendment is an absolute,
complete and total fraud."
-
- When asked where he got the documents, Benson said they
came from "the 48 continental United States," gathered during
his one-year research effort in 1984 aimed at verifying whether or not
the income tax amendment had been properly ratified.
-
- But even activists within the "tax-honesty movement"
grasp the reality of the mission they seek to accomplish: namely, to force
an admission from the federal government that their arguments are correct.
For Uncle Sam to admit his mistake could open the government up to unfair
taxation recovery lawsuits that would make even the landmark tobacco litigation
lawsuit settled for hundreds of billions of dollars pale in comparison.
-
- "I have made it a personal stand not to argue the
code with people. As far as I m concerned, that is nothing more than willfully
walking into quicksand," said <http://www.devvy.comDevvy Kidd,
another noted tax activist. "You can't win the argument."
-
- In the IRS document cited by Benson, there are lots of
references to court cases and IRS code. But the problem, as WND's "TalkNetDaily"
radio host and staff writer Geoff Metcalf points out, is getting
the federal government to cite the legal chapter and verse of the
law that requires mandatory payment of income taxes.
-
- "I have often noted that if in fact we are compelled
by law to pay income tax and the 16th Amendment was in fact properly
and legally ratified (and it wasn't), then the government should be able
to conclude their response in less than five minutes by merely stating,
stanza and verse, where the law is, and how it applies: 'See here? Page
such and such, paragraph such and such, subparagraph such and such.
Now shut up and go home,'" said Metcalf.
-
- One of the most compelling arguments of income tax opponents
is the claim that the 16th Amendment was never even properly ratified,
although understandably the IRS refutes that.
-
- "This argument is based on the premise that all
federal income tax laws are unconstitutional because the Sixteenth Amendment
was not officially ratified, or because the State of Ohio was not properly
a state at the time of ratification," says the IRS document. "This
argument survived over time because proponents mistakenly believe that
the courts have refused to address this issue."
-
- However, the IRS says the amendment was properly ratified
by "forty states, including Ohio, and issued by proclamation in 1913.
Shortly thereafter, two other states also ratified the [A]mendment."
-
- "There were enough states & even without Ohio
to complete" the required three-fourths of the states to ratify the
amendment, said the IRS document. "Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court
upheld the constitutionality of the income tax laws enacted subsequent"
to the ratification of the amendment.
-
- In his research, however, Benson found that only four
states ratified the amendment "without changing the wording."
He maintains that, constitutionally, states cannot change words or punctuation
when voting to accept or reject a constitutional amendment.
-
- "The only thing the states can do is accept or reject
the wording (of an amendment) as is," Benson told WND. "The legislatures
of each state cannot change any of it. Otherwise, we'd have 48 different
versions of the law."
-
- "What is stated [in the IRS document] is a bald-faced
lie," Kidd said.
-
- "Since it was never ratified and we can prove it
wasn t, then apportionment is still in effect and again, everything else
is moot," she said. The government's "progressive, unapportioned
tax is, and always has been, unlawful."
-
- Rather than dicker over IRS codes, legal impressions
and court cases, Kidd and other "tax-honesty" proponents believe
the key to discovering the legality of income tax lies in proving these
contentions:
- * That the IRS is not an authorized agency of the government
and has no authority to conduct business;
- * That the government's jurisdiction is not valid;
- * The fraudulent ratification of the 16th Amendment unlawfully
wiped out the apportionment clause of the Constitution;
- * That an individual is, without question, forced to
involuntarily surrender his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination
by filing any income tax form under penalty of perjury.
-
- Another area of concern, Kidd says, is that the courts
themselves can t even decide, in a universal manner, what constitutes an
income tax or what the income tax really is -- direct or excise.
-
- "That's a fact and it creates what is known as a
problem [IRS] document," she said.
-
- Even former IRS commissioners have questioned the legitimacy
of the very agency they serve.
-
- " & We're confiscating property now. &
That's socialism. It's written into the Communist Manifesto. Maybe we ought
to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist
Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him," lamented
T. Coleman Andrews, the Democratic commissioner of the IRS during the first
33 months of the Republican administration of President Dwight Eisenhower.
-
- But the one fact dogging nearly every tax honesty advocate
is this: Regardless of the actual legitimacy of their arguments, the courts,
Congress and most of the American public don't see it their way.
-
- The IRS can point to dozens of rules, regulations and
court cases -- many decided by the U.S. Supreme Court -- backing the agency's
position that it has a right to tax all of the income earned by American
workers.
-
-
- Also, even critics of the agency acknowledge that it
must collect the amount of money Congress approves in the federal budget
every year. And once passed, Congress expects the Treasury Department to
fill the nation's coffers.
-
- Finally, most states have agreements with the IRS to
provide the agency with information. Under these agreements, individual
states and the IRS notify each other about taxpayers that failed to file
returns. The only state that does not have such an agreement is Nevada.
-
- Nevertheless, tax activists say the September meeting
in Washington, D.C., will once and for all provide them with an opportunity
to address their concerns face-to-face with government and, hopefully,
IRS representatives.
-
- "We intend to prove our points at the hearings next
month," Kidd said.
-
- Related offers:
-
- "The law that never was," a 2-volume set explaining
how the 16th Amendment was never ratified, by Bill Benson.
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