Taking on the IRS
How I caught the IRS cheating on my income tax return By Michael J. Major
Here’s the story of the author’s 12-year war with the IRS. Who do you think will win?
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ou may have read recent reports that the IRS has taken on a kinder, more reasonable stance. In fact, I’ve written one of those reports. Bureaucracy with a human face? Was it true? Well, my article was based on interviews with tax experts who receive their information both from feedback with clients and working directly with IRS personnel on behalf of their clients. So, of course, their responses were true. As far as they went. But then again the question was not raised as to what might happen to these experts and their clients if they indicated that their might be not only a few remaining “bad apples,” but that the entire barrel was rotten to the core. In any event, this is a different kind of story, my personal odyssey through the IRS labyrinth. As background, my conflict with the IRS has grown out of a deeper battle with government, which I need to briefly describe here, very briefly. I’ve adopted six multiracial children. My ex-spouse declared domestic violence. It never happened. The divorce courts are the only ones in which a man is considered guilty until proven innocent, and never gets a chance to prove his innocence. The first judge issues a de facto conviction on the woman’s perjury, which then is upheld by every succeeding judge, which, in my case, has included dozens through every conceivable special interest, city, state, and federal courts, their respective appeals and supreme courts, and countless socalled oversight bodies and other government officials. Why? Upstanding fathers who happen to be divorced is where the money’s at. So-called “child support” is a multibillion dollar racket which makes Enron look like Monopoly and the Mafia men of honor. Enter the IRS in the form of an IRS auditor phoning me regarding my 1999 tax return. When I asked him why I was so chosen, my heart was sinking for I was afraid he would say something along the lines of “random audit.” But, no, he said I had wrongfully declared 34
my oldest son as an exemption. It so happened that when my ex kidnapped the kids in 1995, this son, the oldest, at 14, was old enough to see through her and walk away. He lived with me through 1999, in January of which he turned 18. I still was his main support, but he worked a few odd jobs, and filed his own tax return, declaring himself. I did not claim him. My ex claimed him. And not only had he never lived with her, he had not even spent a night at her place since the 1995 split. So, there you have it, folks. An 18year old who files his own return and claims himself. A father who provides most of his son’s support, but didn’t claim him. And the mother who provided not a penny of his support, who wrongfully claimed him and was never audited, while the father, yours truly, has been targeted for IRS persecution to this day. Why? You’ve heard of Nixon trying to destroy his opponents by sicing the IRS on them. That was mere politics. This is about something really important, at least to the government, and that’s money. Not that I’ve ever had more than enough to barely get by. But rather what I represent, the model middle-class citizen who happens to be a divorced father. The government not only covered up but also was actively complicit in her fraud for it represented big money for state agencies such as Division of Child Support (DCS) and Child Protective Services (CPS) misnomers if there ever was one. It was this crime of the IRS cheating on my income tax which was the legal foundation of all of that followed, the corruption of countless judges, lawyers, government agencies and personnel. To return to the chronology and some specifics, what actually happened was far worse than what I indicated in the single incident I gave above to demonstrate the unassailable clarity of the auditor cheating on my tax return. For, in our initial conversation, he not only stated I had claimed my oldest son, when I had not, but I had also claimed
Wire Rope News & Sling Technology August 2012
two of my other sons, which I had, though lawfully, for they lived with me the entire year. The auditor never acknowledge this fact. Instead, I was to later learn from his notes, he wrote that I claimed my other children who lived with their mother, whom I had not claimed. (As a result of the divorce, there was considerable movement of some of the kids, for various reasons, from one household to another.) In his original communication, he had asked me to send him my justification for my business expense^. I promptly wrote him stating I had moved, lost the records, but would reconstruct them, started the process, asked how he wanted me to proceed, and stated “I will fully cooperate with your audit.” I later found out that when he asked for those justifications, he had already completed his audit, and that he destroyed that letter, plus any of my other communications that got in the way of his a priori case. (An IRS agent destroying records is completely against the law). His notes would later reveal that I was “totally uncooperative” with the audit, again, already completed before he contacted me. At the time I was relieved not to get a response, for it saved me what would have been an onerous task of reconstruction, and, by that time, I was sufficiently convinced of his bad faith to apply for the IRS Offer-in-Compromise (QIC) program. This allows the IRS to collect at least something from a taxpayer it has deemed “un-collectable” and helps the citizen get back on his feet so he can start paying taxes again. I had always paid my taxes until 1999 when the auditor raised these bogus issues. The day the auditor received, registered mail, my QIC papers, he phoned, furious, accusing me of trying to sabotage his audit. I asked him, “Isn’t it true that the auditor should be free to conduct any and all the audits he wants, without interference and they