What penalties can be imposed on tax protesters?
Being a tax protester is not without its costs. The cases against tax protesters usually include one or more of the following civil or criminal penalties: A failure to file an income tax return, or pay the tax when due, results in a civil penalty of 5% per month (not to exceed a total of 25%). IRC section 6651. A willful failure to file an income tax return is a crime punishable a fine of not more than $25,000 and imprisonment of not more than one year, or both. IRC section 7203. This criminal penalty is in addition to the civil penalty under section 6651. IRC section 6702 allows the IRS to impose a $500 civil penalty against any individual who files a return which is incorrect on its face, or from which a tax cannot be calculated, if the return is based on “a position which is frivolous.” or a desire to impede the administration of the federal income tax. This penalty is often imposed against tax protesters who file returns with that are blank, contain frivolous claims regarding what
*********************************************************************** The income tax cannot apply to individual citizens, because that would be a “direct tax” prohibited by the Constitution. False. Although the meaning of “direct tax” is a little unclear, it was always understood that taxes imposed by Congress could apply to individual citizens. In Hylton v. United States, 3 U.S. 171 (1796), the Supreme Court was unanimous in its opinion that Congress could impose a tax on a citizen of Virginia. Of the four justices who heard the case, three were members of the Constitutional Convention that drafted the Constitution, and presumably knew what it meant. Since the Hylton decision, no judge in the United States has ever even considered that the federal government cannot impose a tax on individual citizens. As recently as 1991, the Supreme Court referred to arguments that the federal income tax was unconstitutional as “surely frivolous.” Cheek v. United States, 498 U.S. 192 (1991). The fe
