Protesters Win a Case Over I.R.S. (Sacramento)

[struggle4progress]

New York Times

The federal government's campaign against income tax protesters suffered a major setback yesterday when a federal jury in Sacramento acquitted a former Internal Revenue Service investigator on charges of helping to prepare false tax returns.

The former investigator, Joseph R. Banister, 42, of San Jose, Calif., has become a hero to the tax protest movement, even though two of his clients are serving long prison sentences after following his advice. <snip>

Mr. Banister resigned from the I.R.S. criminal investigation division in 1999 after he wrote a lengthy report asserting that no law requires the payment of taxes and that Americans were being tricked into paying them. The theories he has put forth have been uniformly rejected by the courts. <snip>

"It is hard to convict promoters," Mr. Adkisson said. "Promoters make a lot of money off their marks, watch their marks go to jail for not paying taxes and then take advantage of a loophole that lets them prepare bogus returns that they characterize as protest returns" prepared at the direction of the client. <snip>

http://www.wilmingtonstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050624/ZNYT01/506240350/1004/Local

[Systematic Chaos]

1. That's why you don't file a goddamn thing.

If you truly believe that you're not actually subject to or liable for any such withholding, you create a paper trail of total non-compliance. You DON'T submit fictitious returns that can be altered by the government to show the proper figures, as stipulated right in the Internal Revenue Code. But whatever. :eyes: