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Why the Tax Court declines to partake in frivolity

June 01, 2011

Usually the Tax Court issues a "reported" opinion when it either is addressing a new issue or it wants to send a message. Yesterday they sent a message with an reported opinion explaining "Why we usually decline to refute frivolous anti-tax arguments":

Experience shows that a given frivolous argument may have little actual importance to the person making it. Frivolous anti-tax arguments are often obviously downloaded from the Internet; and by cut-and-paste word processing functions, these arguments are easily plunked into a party's filing. In other instances a promoter of frivolous anti-tax arguments is feeding those arguments to a litigant who adopts them uncritically and submits them to the Court. For all a court can tell, the litigant may not even have carefully read the arguments he submits.

Petitioners who make frivolous anti-tax arguments are sometimes intelligent people, but they tend to show great ignorance about the legal matters they argue. Tax defiers have learned to admit to the Court (as Mr. Wnuck did) that they have no legal background or training. The admission is often manifestly true. However, this admission is evidently made only to induce the Court to be lenient in overlooking the pro se litigant's procedural lapses and to incline the Court to be liberal in construing his pleadings. The admission of ignorance does not indicate a willingness to accept information from someone who does have that background and training in tax law.

The frivolous argument, made from this position of witting and willful ignorance, seems to be merely an incidental ornament that adorns an article of faith -- namely, the belief that I don't owe taxes. The tax defier firmly holds that postulate above and apart from any arguments. Anything in favor of that postulate may be advanced, no matter how silly; anything against it can be ignored. If a given frivolous argument is decisively rebutted, then it may or may not be retired; but even if the individual argument is retired, the cause is not abandoned. Thus, the specific argument hardly matters even to the litigant.

Consequently, the value of answering frivolous anti-tax arguments -- even the subjective value to the individual litigant -- is often doubtful.

The court provides some other reasons why it doesn't bother explaining the obvious, and uses the hapless petitioner to illustrate:

Mr. Wnuck contends that the term "United States" therefore excludes everything else (such as the 50 States) and that his services performed in Pennsylvania (not in Puerto Rico, etc.) were not performed in the "United States" and therefore did not yield taxable wages. His argument fails for obvious reasons:

a. "Includes" does not mean "includes only".
...

b. The cited statute does not apply.

...

c. The cited case contradicts the argument.

There's a lot more of this in the case. While Mr. Wnuck loses, and gets hit with a $5,000 penalty for pursuing frivolous arguments in Tax Court, he has the consolation of the assurance that his name will now appear in most every Tax Court frivolous return case for years to come.

Cite: Wnuck, 136 T.C. No. 24

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