Nearly 40 years before We the People placed full-page ads in USA Today urging would-be taxpayers to safeguard their constitutional rights by refusing to file income tax returns, a building contractor from Wichita, Kansas, named Arthur Julius Porth scribbled “I plead the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States” across his Form 1040 and sent it to the IRS.
Opposition to the federal income tax predates Porth’s 1961 rebellion, but his one-man act of defiance inspired a legion of activists, helped spark a national “Tax Strike” movement in the two decades that followed and laid the groundwork for today’s generation of militant tax protesters.
Although the government finally cracked down on tax protesters in the early 1980s, imposing new penalties and launching prosecutions that sharply curtailed the growth of the movement Porth and others had created, that did not last.
In 1998, after holding one-sided hearings into alleged IRS abuses, Congress reversed course, passing legislation that has drastically weakened IRS enforcement, cost as much as $300 billion in lost tax revenues, and helped to unleash a new wave of tax rebellion.
Today, the number of those who simply refuse to file has skyrocketed, and federal tax and Treasury Department officials have shown a remarkable reluctance to act decisively.
In just six years, a taxpayer’s chance of being audited has fallen from one in 67 to less than one in 200, with the IRS’ budget slashed by more than a quarter since the 1980s. Property seizures to recoup back taxes have virtually ended.
And, as The New York Times reported last April, the IRS, struggling to stay within its meager budget, effectively wrote off $2.5 billion owed by 668,018 taxpayers.
“I am worried,” said Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who then headed the Senate Finance Committee, “that the IRS is a dog that doesn’t have a bark.”
How did we get here? How is it that the poor in America now have a substantially higher likelihood than the rich of having their tax returns audited? How can increasing numbers of businesses and individuals simply refuse to file without much fear of prison or fines?
Although right-wing tax protesters cannot claim all the credit for this “victory,” they are certainly reaping the benefits.
As the story of the tax protest movement and its founding patriarchs reveals, some of the central ideas espoused by the anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus and other tax-protesting “Christian Patriots” — including many in the militias — have now penetrated far into the mainstream. As we look at the situation today, it is important to understand how we got here.