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JACK KNOWS JACK

August 22, 2005

Tax Analysts notes a somewhat old case from May in which Jack Cohen, the sponsor of the now defunct "taxax.org" website gets a permanent injunction against promoting his tax protestor theories. The judge describes the issue:

Through the internet, Mr. Cohen has promoted the idea that the U.S. tax system is a "hoax" and that the payment of federal income taxes is voluntary. (Pl's. Ex. 1). Additionally, Mr. Cohen advertised a number of products on his website aimed at "educating" people about their "right" to not pay taxes. Examples of these products are his book American Liberty vs. Forced Withholding and a Custom Letter, which is designed to "build a solid foundation to reverse the government's presumption that we are 'taxpayers' pursuant to the Code, instead of `taxpayers' in the ordinary sense of the term," and to "keep the IRS scrambling . . ." (Pl's Ex. 24). The distinction that Mr. Cohen draws between "tax payers" and "taxpayers" is based on his contention that the I.R.C. is not a real "code of laws," that the Secretary of the Treasury does not have authorization to operate outside of the territorial confines of Washington, D.C., and that the only people subject to tax are foreign nationals. (Cohen Dep. At 24, 30; Cohen Aff. at 13, 15).

You gotta love the transcendent significance the "Tax Honesty" crowd gives to capitalization, punctuation and compound word structure. Last week we noted a case where the taxpayer (tax payer?) fought the IRS on the ground that their given name had lower-case letters, so the notice that used all caps was invalid. Others like to put commas in their names, as if to ward off government jurisdiction beams.

Unfortunately for Mr. Cohen, the Court of Appeals seems more concerned with filing fees than with grammar.

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