(Back to IRS Introduction)The IRS Unvolunteering Case that has been followed by this web site is now over. It was actually over several months ago but I have been too depressed, and angry, to write a summary of what happened. Too make a long story short, my wife and I decided that fighting the IRS was taking too large a toll in terms of money, time, and health (mental and physical). We decided to capitulate and paid what the IRS examiner said we owed in exchange for the IRS dropping any and all contemplated actions. There were some valuable lessons learned and this section of the web site will stay up so that others may benefit from our experiences. If you are interested, a summary of the end is included below.
A couple of months after responding to the legal advice letter from the IRS, four neatly dressed (coat & tie) men showed up at our door. When I answered the door, they asked if I was Joe Sovereign. I asked, "Who wants to know?" Instead of answering, one of the men shoved a paper at me and the four of them walked off. (I have since decided that they were probably agents of the US Marshall's Sevice.) The paper was a summons to appear in US District Court to show cause why we should not be held in contempt of the IRS. (Hard to defend against that charge.)
My wife and I discussed the options and decided that this was actually what we had been working for, i.e., a chance to present our case in a real court. (Major error here. US District Courts are not real courts. They are administrative courts of the US Federal Government. Granting jurisdiction to this court was a major and near irreversible mistake.) We filed a motion to dismiss. We filed information briefs with the court. We started to feel like we lived in the court house. Finally, our big day arrived. The US Attorney presented his case to the court. Now it was our turn. I said, "Your honor, we believe that the Internal Revenue Code does not apply to us because...". At that point, I was interrupted by the judge, whose face had turned beet red, and raised up out of his chair, looking for all the world as if he was going to leap across the bench and physically attack me. He yelled, no exaggeration here, and I don't remember exactly what he said but, basically, he indicated that if I didn't show up at the IRS office with my records, I would go to jail and stay there until I decided to comply.
Now my wife and I had a big decision to make. We could continue on and wait for criminal charges to be filed, and then hope that we could convince a jury that the IRS had no case or we could cave now and save ourselves a lot of time and money. Not to mention the now real possibility of losing. After experiencing what actually goes on in a courtroom (we visited the court several times to see what kind of judge we had drawn), our assessment of the probability of winning our case had decreased to around fifty percent. I was willing to take even those odds but my wife was very hesitant about it. Plus, we had to consider the local culture.
The culture in this area is, to put it mildly, collectivist. To give you an idea of how collectivist, it was one of the few areas in the country that voted decidely in favor of Al Gore for President. This means that even a randomly chosen jury would most likely believe strongly that everyone should pay "their fair share". Add in the jury stacking that goes on in today's courts and my assessment of the probability of getting a sympathetic jury is somewhat less than fifty percent. We could appeal if we lose, of course, but we have already decided that federal judges appear to be committed to maintaining the tax system.
Another factor that we had to weigh was that all the "legal eagles", some of whom had advised us to do basically what we had done, were now refusing to answer email and phone calls. The ones who had not advised us were now telling us to make a deal. (If you decide to fight the IRS, pick your advisers very carefully.) We started to feel like we were standing out there alone with no one to support us. So...
Considering all the above, we decided to cave. We appeared at the IRS examiner's office as instructed by the court, made our deal, paid up, and are now getting on with our lives.
My advice? If you decide to fight the IRS, decide up front that you are prepared to lose and either pay big bucks or go to jail, probably for a long time. If you have a significant other, kids, loved pets, etc, don't even bother to begin. When it comes down to the crunch, your loved ones will have to take precendence over prinicipal. The IRS counts on that.
That's about it. We hope that our experiences will be of some use to some of you.
(Back to WEPIN Store Home Page)
Copyright at Common Law, West El Paso Information Network, 1999