http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1845-2003Aug16.htmlLast week a jury in Memphis acquitted a woman of criminal charges arising from her refusal to pay federal income taxes on $920,000 she earned from 1996 to 2001. The basis for her refusal, which the jury apparently found sufficient, was that the Internal Revenue Service hadn't showed her where in the law it says she had to pay.
She wrote the IRS a letter in 1995, she said, demanding an answer to her question, and when none was forthcoming, she filed W-4 forms indicating she didn't owe tax. The IRS eventually brought criminal charges of tax evasion and filing false W-4s. If she had been convicted by the federal court jury, she would have faced up to 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines.
The defense employed by Vernice Kuglin, a 58-year-old FedEx pilot, was a variation on a longtime theme of tax protesters, which in essence says that Congress somehow neglected to put the trigger in the tax gun -- all this tax law but no provision saying you actually have to pay.
Other courts have been giving this argument short shrift. The U.S. Tax Court, which specializes in handling civil tax cases and has grown thoroughly impatient with tax protesters, is increasingly willing to hand out penalties of thousands of dollars in such cases. And the IRS has persuaded a federal court in Nevada to bar protester Irwin Schiff from selling a book that contends taxes are voluntary.
Nonetheless, a jury was persuaded by Kuglin's argument -- that because IRS forms say the agency is required to cite various code sections before asking for taxpayer information, it is required to respond to her demands that she be shown where it says she has to pay.
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