No Liability: Evaluating Your Personal Attitude

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Evaluating Your Personal Attitude

Post 2 of 11

The best place to start your process of choosing a tax strategy is with your own attitudes. If you believe you will burn in hell for not filing a tax return, you will not be happy with becoming a non-filer. If you believe you will burn in hell for supporting a government that is responsible for supplying the weapons that support wars around the world, then you will not be happy with total compliance. Examining your own beliefs is the only way to establish a reliable basis for deciding what course of action will best suit you.

There are a variety of general strategies; total compliance, partial compliance, legal assertion of rights, moral assertion of rightness, or apathetic ignorance, to name a few of the more popular ones. Every strategy has its hazards and its benefits, the reality of which depends upon your own experience and your perception of others peoples reported experiences. If you know people who have had first hand dealings with the IRS you will have a different perception than another person who's knowledge is only based on the evening news stories about the IRS. The truth is that evaluating the risks is, at best, a guessing game. No matter what strategy you choose to examine, there are always success stories and just as many or more horror stories if you search long enough.If you go with only the first information you discover about a particular strategy you will be misinformed exactly to the degree that the story you heard was biased by the storyteller. And every storyteller has a bias, including me. Your own bias is going to inform how you evaluate the different sources of information you access. Another word for bias is philosophy, so you need to develop your own philosophy because subscribing to someone else’s philosophy is the best way to get yourself confused and possibly into trouble.

Your emotional and philosophical positions are better indicators of the rightness of any given strategy because the fact is you are going to have to summon your deepest spiritual resources in order to face a serious challenge, regardless of the strategy or philosophy you chose. Even those who choose total compliance get audited or otherwise challenged to defend themselves. Consider that the overwhelming majority of people who go to jail for tax offenses filed returns. Therefore, you are more likely to go to jail for filing a return than for not filing a return. The fundamental fact is that you need to be prepared to defend any course you choose. The most important question to answer is how hard you are willing to fight for whatever choice you make. If you are not willing to fight, then you need to look for a strategy that will be the easiest to get out of a fight easily and quickly. That usually means paying whatever they tell you to pay, and you need to structure your affairs accordingly. If you are willing to fight to the death against war taxes, then you should choose a strategy that will serve your highest purpose and will not get obscured by other issues. No matter what course you take, you must make preparations and anticipate the resistance you may encounter. You are responsible for your choices and your best course is the one you personally believe is right.

You need to get very clear about what issues are important to you. If you seriously pursue an investigation of the information I present, you will undoubtedly find a lot of very angry people who are quick to take moral high ground on legal issues, and others who take the legal high ground on moral issues, and you will hear the stories of how the courts have dealt blows to all different philosophies. If you do not care about legal issues, do not take on a legalistic strategy. You need to know the legal issues, of course, but do not make legal issues central to your arguments unless you are willing to follow though with the legal procedures that will back up your legal arguments. Once you choose an issue or a set of issues, stick to them and keep them consistent. Clarity is the best defense because any jury or judge will at least have respect for your consistency and clarity even if they feel compelled to rule against you.