Tax protester conspiracy arguments

Tax protesters in the United States advance a number of conspiracy arguments asserting that Congress, the courts and various agencies within the federal government—primarily the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)—are involved in a deception deliberately designed to from individuals or entities their wealth or profits in of law. Conspiracy arguments, though related to, are distinct from constitutional, statutory, and administrative arguments. Proponents of such arguments contend that all three branches of the United States government are working to defraud the taxpayers of the United States through the illegal imposition, assessment and collection of a federal income tax.

Tax protester Irwin Schiff, following his criminal conviction for tax fraud that resulted in the imposition of a 13-year prison sentence, released a statement asserting in part that "the entire federal judiciary is involved in a monumental, criminal conspiracy to collect income taxes in violation of law". Schiff's web site continues to state: "Since the income tax was repealed in 1954 when Congress adopted the 1954 Code, it is clear that for 50 years federal judges in conspiracy with U. S. Department of Injustice [sic] prosecutors have been illegally and criminally prosecuting people for crimes that do not exist in connection with a tax that nobody owes."

One tax protester web site, called www.tax-freedom.com, quotes from an article by William Cooper titled "BATF/IRS - Criminal Fraud", from the publication Veritas (issue no. 6, September 1995), as follows:

Investigation of the alleged Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has disclosed a broad, premeditated conspiracy to defraud the Citizens of the United States of America. Examination of the United States Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, the Statutes at Large, Congressional Record, the Federal Register, and Internal Revenue manuals too numerous to list, reveals a crime of such magnitude that words cannot adequately describe the betrayal of the American people. What we uncovered has clearly been designed to circumvent the limitations of the Constitution for the United States of America and to implement the Communist Manifesto within the 50 States. Marx and Engels claimed that, in the effort to create a classless society, a "graduated income tax" could be used as a weapon to destroy the middle class. … Through the clever use of language, the government promotes the fraud.

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