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 Americas & Beyond | April 2008 
U.S. Says It Will Increase Efforts Against ‘Tax Defiers’
 Lynnley Browning - NYTimes
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| | Justice Department lawyers have filed hundreds of civil injunctions to fight the promotion of tax-evasion schemes. | | |
If you think paying taxes is unfair, illegal or unconstitutional, then watch out — the Justice Department is after you.
Just as the Internal Revenue Service is getting into its perennial tax-season tough talk, Justice Department officials weighed in Tuesday with a vow to ramp up efforts against “tax defiers.”
A tax defier is not a wealthy individual who buys a sophisticated tax shelter in a fraudulent effort to shield legitimate income from taxes. Nor is a defier a taxpayer who has a difference of opinion with the I.R.S. over deductions, or one who challenges specific tax policies enacted by Congress.
A tax defier, according to a Justice Department statement, is someone who “seeks to deny and defy the fundamental validity of the tax laws.”
“The tax defier is someone who rejects the legal foundation of the tax system, despite decades of legal precedent upholding the system’s constitutional and statutory validity, and who takes specific and concrete action to violate the law,” the department’s statement said.
Such people were once more commonly known as tax protesters. A spokesman for Justice said Tuesday that the department official who announced the new program, Nathan J. Hochman, the assistant attorney general for the tax division, “is calling them defiers because he feels ‘protesters’ implies constitutionally protected rights.”
Prominent among them is the actor Wesley Snipes, who was convicted in February by a federal jury on several tax-related charges but was acquitted of more serious tax charges. Mr. Snipes was found to have failed to file returns or pay taxes from 1999 through 2001, but was acquitted of charges that he failed to do the same from 2002 through 2004, after he said he learned that he was the target of a criminal tax investigation.
The name of the new program — the National Tax Defier Initiative, or TaxDef — was a source of some amusement Tuesday among tax policy specialists.
But one such specialist, the financial consultant J J MacNab, said TaxDef would make “what’s going on in a hodgepodge way into a national program.”
Since 2001, the Justice Department has won more than 300 civil injunctions against tax promoters and preparers; a third of which involved tax-defier activity. The efforts brought in $600 million in unpaid taxes, it said. |
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