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Check out IRS vs Kuglin for more fun; Vernice Kuglin got to keep nearly $1,000,000 in "owed" back taxes after a multi-year court battle because the IRS was simply unable to produce the law authorizing them to collect taxes from her. This was about three years ago, I think. Vaious people have had various levels of success fighting the IRS; it all comes down to
A: The judge. If the judge is half honest and allows the arguement to proceed at all, that's half the battle. Most judges, however, won't even allow a Constitutional or legal arguement in any criminal case, only an arguement on the facts of the case itself.
B: The paperwork. People who choose to use document filings to lawfully not pay Income Taxes walk a veeeeery thin line. One word out of place, and you're in jail, just ask Larkin Rose or Irwin Schiff. This is why a lot of folks prefer to simply not pay and then take the "Well, show me the law!" tack in court if/when they get caught.
Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Ed and Elaine Brown, up in New Hampshire, are a good example of what happens when it doesn't work. They're probably going to get WACOed over this and have already lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets..."going to the mat" indeed.*
*The good news is that the odds of actually getting nailed are quite slim, given the HUGE numbers of people (60,000,000+ according to the IRS's own figures) who don't file or don't pay every year and the small number of IRS-CID agents available.
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