Anonymous

"There is no law limiting how intrusive a search and seizure raid can be."
Unnamed IRS Agent

Donald C. Alexander
IRS Commissioner

"The mission of the service is to encourage and achieve the highest possible degree of voluntary compliance.
Federal Register, March 1974

T. Coleman Andrews
Commissioner of IRS

"Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him."
U.S. News & World Report May 25, 1956

Dwight E. Avis
Head of ATF
IRS House Ways and Means Subcommittee Hearings 1953

"Let me point this out now. Your income tax is 100 percent voluntary and your liquor tax is 100 percent enforced tax. Now the situation is as different as day and night. Consequently, your same rules just will not apply... "

Henry Bellmon
Senator (1969)

"In a recent conversation with an official at the Internal Revenue Service, I was amazed when he told me that 'If the taxpayers of this country ever discover that the IRS operates on 90% bluff the entire system will collapse.'"

Hugo Black
Supreme Court Justice

"The United States has a system of taxation by confession."
U.S. v. Kahriger

Senator Richard Bryan
Nevada

"As you know, the Senate Finance Committee held a series of hearings on problems with the complex tax code and the IRS. These hearings brought public many horror stories on the tactics used by the IRS. Additionally, my office received an anonymous fax which indicated that the regional offices of the IRS were maintaining quotas on collection agents; in effect rewarding these agents not for accuracy, but for how much they collected. I immediately contacted the new IRS Director who assured me publicly that practice would end. This practice has long been illegal, and legislation has now been passed that will strengthen the agency responsible for curbing this and other abuses.”
November 9, 1999.

Richard E. Byrd
Virginia House Speaker
1910

"A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man’s business; the eye of the federal inspector will be in every man’s counting house.... The law will of necessity have inquisical features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it, men will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of federal inspectors, spies, arid detectives will descend upon the state."
predicting what would happen if the federal Congress were to enact a federal Income tax.

Mortimer Caplin
IRS Commissioner

"Our tax system is based on individual self-assessment and voluntary compliance.
1975 IRS IR Audit Manual

Senator Frank Church
Chairman, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
94th Congress, First Session

"If the law does not assure that tax returns filed by Americans will not be turned against them, our system of voluntary compliance with the tax laws faces a doubtful future.
Volume 3, Internal Revenue Service (October 2, 1975)

Jack Cole Co. v. MacFarland
337 S.W. 2d. 453, 455-456 (Tenn. 1960)

"Since the Right to receive income or earnings is a Right belonging to every person, this right cannot be taxed as a privilege."

Judge Cummings
U.S. Federal Judge

"Only the rare taxpayer would be likely to know that he could refuse to produce his records to IRS agents... Who would believe the ironic truth that the cooperative taxpayer fares much worse than the individual who relies upon his constitutional rights.
U.S. v. Dickerson (7th Circuit 1969)

Albert Einstein

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."

Form1040 Tax Instruction Booklet

"You are among the millions of Americans who comply with the tax law voluntarily."
1992

Albert Gallatin
Secretary of the Treasury

"An internal tax on consumption essentially differs from a tax on visible property because, in the last case, nothing is more requisite than an account of what a man appears to be possessed of, whilst, in the other, it is necessary to know the quantity and quality of the article consumed; and in order to attain that knowledge a severe inquisition must take place... and... extraordinary & dangerous powers must be given to the collectors."

Fred Goldberg
IRS Commissioner

"We have a voluntary compliance system."
Nightline with Ted Koppel, April 13, 1990

Grace Commission

"100% of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal Debt... all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services taxpayers expect from government."
Report submitted to President Ronald Reagan in 1984

Alexander Hamilton

"There is no method of steering clear of this inconvenience, but by authorizing the national government to raise its own revenues in its own way. Imposts, excises, and, in general, all duties upon articles of consumption, may be compared to a fluid, which will, in time, find its level with the means of paying them. The amount to be contributed by each citizen will in a degree be at his own option, and can be regulated by an attention to his resources. The rich may be extravagant, the poor can be frugal; and private oppression may always be avoided by a judicious selection of objects proper for such impositions. If inequalities should arise in some States from duties on particular objects, these will, in all probability, be counterbalanced by proportional inequalities in other States, from the duties on other objects. In the course of time and things, an equilibrium, as far as it is attainable in so complicated a subject, will be established everywhere.
Federalist Papers 79

"In the general course of human nature, a power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will."

Dorcas R. Hardy
former Commissioner of Social Security

"There is no law requiring a person to apply for a Social Security number, and there is no section of title 18, United States Code, making it a crime to not have a social security number."

Thomas Jefferson

"[W]e must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds...we [will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery. And the foreshores of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

"The remaining revenue on the consumption of foreign articles is paid chiefly by those who can afford to add foreign luxuries to domestic comforts, being collected on our seaboard and frontiers only, and incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may be the pleasure and the pride of an American to ask, What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer ever sees a taxgatherer of the United States?"
2nd Inaugural Address

"The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers and opening our door to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which once entered is scarcely to be restrained from reaching, successively, every article of property and produce."

Ambassador Alan Keyes
2000 Presidential candidate

"We ought to have realized that the income tax is utterly incompatible with liberty. It is actually a form of slavery.... Under the income tax, the government takes whatever percentage of the earner's income it wants. The income tax, therefore, represents our national surrender to the government of control over all the money we earn."

Jerome Kurtz
IRS Commissioner

"The IRS's primary task is to collect taxes under a voluntary compliance system."
1980 IR Annual Report

Senator Paul Laxalt

"The high-handed bureaucratic excesses of the IRS are a national disgrace... riding roughshod over the taxpayers and making a joke out of our rule of laws."

Loan Association v. Topeka
United States Supreme Court (1874)

"To lay with one hand the power of government on the property of the citizen, and with the other to bestow it on favored individuals... is none the less robbery because it is... called taxation."

Senator Edward V. Long

"The IRS has become morally corrupted by the enormous power which we in Congress have unwisely entrusted to it. Too often it acts like a Gestapo preying upon defenseless citizens."

"The Privacy Act, if enforced would be a pretty good thing. But the government doesn't like it. Government has an insatiable appetite for power, and it will not stop usurping power unless it is restrained by laws they cannot repeal or nullify. There are mighty few laws they cannot nullify."

Edward M. Kennedy

"The tax system is stacked against the average taxpayer."

Gary Makovski
Special IRS Agent

"If no information or return is filed, [the] Internal Revenue Service cannot assess you."
Testifying under oath in U.S. v. Lloyd

Chief Justice John Marshall

"The power to tax involves the power to destroy."

Daniel J. Mitchell
Economist

"Compare this (40% to 75% total local, State and Federal tax rate) to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor a third of their output and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us?"

Ms. Shirley D. Peterson
former Commissioner of the IRS

"Eight decades of amendments and accretions to the Code have produced a virtually impenetrable maze. The rules are unintelligible to most citizens - Including those who hold advanced degrees and including many who specialize in tax law. The rules are equally mysterious to many government employees who are charged with administering and enforcing the law.

"It is also a known fact that the Internal Revenue Code is a very easily misunderstood area of law, even misunderstood by trained professionals. Judges and lawyers admittedly do not know the tax laws."
"Tax Policy Lecture" before Southern Methodist University, April 14, 1993

Publication 21

"'Do you have to file a tax return and pay taxes?'

"Answer:
'The U. S. income tax system is built on the idea of 'voluntary compliance.' This means that it is left to the taxpayer to keep the necessary records, file a return on time, pay any required taxes, and meet any other requirements of the tax law. The system is built on trust in the citizens to know their responsibilities and to do what needs to be done. Taxpayers voluntarily follow the steps the tax system lays out. Failure to do so can result in penalties.

"Two aspects of the Federal Income Tax system - voluntary compliance with the law and self-assessment of tax - make it important for you to understand your rights and responsibilities as a taxpayer. 'Voluntary compliance' places on the taxpayer the responsibility for filing an income tax return. You must decide whether the law requires you to file a return. If it does, you must file your return by the date it is due. IRS Publication 21."

Ronald Reagan

"No nation ever taxed itself into prosperity."

Pastor Everett Sileven
Faith Baptist Church
Louisville, Nebraska

"God has commanded us to preserve our assets to create an inheritance for our children. With the criminal IRS and other government agencies after our assets at all times, it is difficult to make that preservation."

Joseph Sobran

"The most successful terrorist organizations on earth are government tax agencies...."

So. Pacific v. Lowe
238 F.847 (1917)

"'Income,' as used in the statute should be given the meaning so as not to include everything that comes in. The true function of the words 'gains' and 'profits' is to limit the meaning of the word 'income.'"

Paul Strassel
Former IRS Headquarters Agent

"The real point of audits is to instill fear, not to extract revenue; the IRS aims at winning through intimidation and (thereby) getting maximum voluntary compliance."
Wall Street Journal 1/28/80

United States v. Flora
362 US 145 (1958)

"Our system of taxation is based on voluntary assessment and payment, not upon distraint."

Voltaire

"In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other."

Johnie M. Walters
IRS Commissioner

"Each year American taxpayers voluntarily file their tax returns and make a special effort to pay the taxes they owe."
1971 Form 1040 Booklet

The Washington Post

"The IRS's goal is to increase the rate at which taxpayers voluntarily pay their taxes from the current 82.3% to 90% by 2001."
Front page, Dec. 2, 1993, IRS Hopes Change

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