"It's so simple, it's ridiculous": taxing times for 16th amendment rebels

Reason, May, 2004 by Brian Doherty

Other aspects of how the system treated Simkanin should further discourage tax rebels. Despite being a 59-year-old heretofore-respectable small-business owner not yet convicted of anything, he has been in jail since June. (A federal plant claimed via hearsay, denied in court testimony by someone who was present when the comment was allegedly made, that Simkanin had threatened to kill some judges. The prosecutors sure knew their audience.) During the trial Simkanin was dragged into court in leg irons. The IRS doesn't resort to criminal prosecution very often, so when it does, it wants to make a vivid example.

It's Magic, You Know: Never Believe It's Not So

The We The People conference brought together many of the movement's leading lights. It also presents some new strategies. Schulz, with the help of superstar radical lawyer Mark Lane, is in the process of launching a class action lawsuit to call the government's cheating hand on this whole income tax matter.

Lane has a mysterious tendency to be wherever the quirky action is in American politics and law. He's famous for being one of the first Warren Commission revisionists with his 1966 book Rush to Judgment and for being the lawyer for People's Temple death cultist Jim Jones. He has successfully defended some tax honesty clients, though he tells me: "I pay taxes and never advise any client not to. But I can tell you, I've read all these cases, and I don't see where it says you have to pay, and I don't understand why the government doesn't answer [Schulz's] questions."

The planned suit relies on interestingly fresh grounds: Schulz is claiming that all these government officials who refuse to answer his questions about the income tax are violating his First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Surely, after all, that right must include the ability not merely to send in such petitions but to get some sort of reasonable response.

Schulz recruits plaintiffs at the conference for another planned class action, this one against employers who have refused to stop with holding income tax from their paychecks when employees request it. This is illegal according to Schulz's reading of U.S. Code Title 26, Subtitle C, Chapter 24, Section 3402(n), which does indeed seem to indicate, to quote that section, that "notwithstanding any other provision of this section, an employer shall not be required to deduct and withhold any tax under this chapter upon a payment of wages to an employee if there is in effect with respect to such payments a withholding exemption certificate ... furnished to the employer by the employee certifying that the employee--(1) incurred no liability for income tax imposed under subtitle A for his preceding taxable year, and (2) anticipates that he will incur no liability for income tax imposed under subtitle I for his current taxable year."

This is an option on every W4 form. Schulz maintains that the language of the law clearly implies the employer can't get in trouble with the IRS for not withholding as long as the employee thus certifies. As a matter of fact, if not law, the IRS will regularly question such W4s (or ones that claim "too many" exemptions) and lean on employers to start deducting as if a straight one-exemption W4 has been filed. Schulz thinks any employer doing that--and some do so even without the IRS's prodding--should be sued, and he intends to do so in the spring.