War Tax Resistance: Two Complementary Visions

By Karl Meyer

I see two alternative visions that I call War Tax Protest and Resistance and War Tax Refusal. I distinguish these two basic approaches by an analogy with the behavior of electrical energy. Copper is a material that allows, but resists, the passage of electric currents. The process of resistance generates heat and visible light radiating from wires. Porcelain, and other non-conductors, refuse the passage of electrical currents.

War Tax Protest and Resistance

Those following the Protest and Resistance approach typically file annual returns with the IRS, honestly reporting their income, but withholding payment of a token amount, or some percentage of the tax calculated as due. Often, they send a letter to the IRS explaining their reasons. Withholding any part of tax shown as due typically leads to a long succession of increasingly threatening letters demanding payment, plus a variety of penalties, assessment of a current 7% rate of interest, compounded daily, and eventual collection, or attempts at collection, by garnishment of income sources, and seizure by levy on liquid assets in banks or stock accounts. By these methods the IRS may eventually collect much more money than the resister originally refused to pay.

War Tax Refusal

In the alternative approach, that I describe as War Tax Refusal, refusers may be very open and public in writing and speaking about their refusal, but they may typically file no returns with the IRS, or notify the IRS directly. They make no payments to the IRS of amounts that might be legally due. Instead, they distribute all such money, and often more, as donations to organizations and causes that they believe to be positively beneficial to others and for the common good of all people and our Mother Earth.

Should the IRS become actively aware of their refusal, calculate taxes allegedly due, and assess claims against them, refusers may typically take effective steps to protect their assets from discovery and seizure by the IRS. This approach works most effectively for refusers who are self-employed, or paid through contractual arrangements in a variety of occupations where payments are not reported to the IRS by those making the payments.

I have used the complete refusal practice very effectively for 65 years since 1960, while being well known to the IRS in Chicago and nationally through my widely read writings about war tax refusal, and widely publicized actions of public witness. In the early 1990s I wrote original drafts for the first four pamphlets in NWTRCC’s Practical WTR series.

365 Daily Tax Protest Returns

The only exceptions to my practice of the complete refusal method was in 1984 when I filed a total of 365 daily tax protest returns to many different IRS offices around the country, in a public protest intended to mobilize wide resistance to the recently enacted “frivolous claims penalty,” at that time $500 for each claim. The IRS reacted by assessing a total of $140,000 in penalties, and sending me an accumulation of a whole file drawer of notices and demands for payment. They collected only $1,000 by auctioning a station wagon and trailer seized off the street from me. The cost to the IRS of this whole process exceeded by far the amount realized at auction. My action and the IRS response garnered publicity about war tax refusal in mass media around the United States from Los Angeles to the Wall Street Journal in New York. The total of all other successful seizures from me across sixty-five years of refusal has amounted to less than $500. I have been self-employed as a carpenter since learning the trade in 1975.

Other War Tax Refusers

For forty years my former wife, Kathy Kelly, one of the best-known pacifist activists and war tax refusers in the United States, used the same methods of refusal. She began practicing war tax refusal in 1982 when we married. My recently deceased Nashville partner, Pamela Beziat, used the same methods, with no collections, since 1998 when we got together, as did our beloved World War II generation mentors, Wally and Juanita Nelson, Marion and Ernest Bromley, Rev Maurice McCrackin, and Eroseanna Robinson.

All war tax protesters, resisters, or refusers have the opportunity to make their own personal choices of methods and actions by the light of personal conscience.