NH Tax Evasion Standoff

I just found out about this this morning. Ed and Elaine Brown are holed up in their NH home. In January they were convicted of tax evasion for refusing to pay income taxes. They don't believe the government has the right to collect income taxes. The wikipedia page has a Chronology of events.

Elaine is a dentist and they have a home on 110 acres, in Plainfield NH (satellite photo via Google Maps). Apparently they didn't report a lot of income over several years. In April they were sentenced to 63 months in jail.

I've seen wildly different amounts mentioned in the various news articles I've read. This one seems to be the highest and also the most detailed. "Elaine Brown was found guilty of evading federal income taxes on the nearly $1.9 million she earned as a dentist between 1996 and 2003. At trial, prosecutors estimated that her unpaid taxes were about $625,000 for those years. But with interest and penalties, that number has jumped to close to $2 million. Brown was also found guilty of failing to withhold employment taxes for the workers at her practice. A separate federal lien shows that liability for those taxes has risen to $194,000." According to an April US District Court ruling there is a state tax lien for $348,235.32.

Watch their press conference from a week ago; you won't be pursuaded. In it they say the IRS code doesn't apply to them, only to people involved in alcohol or firearms trade and a few other things. The Tax Protester FAQ debunks these claims as does this PDF from the IRS.

I've also seen articles saying the Browns claim that the 16th Amendment was never ratified. Wikipedia has a page that points out all the flaws in the Tax protester constitutional arguments. The ratification argument is that the states ratified copies of amendment with different capitalization and punctuation. Other amendments had those problems (gee I guesss it was common when copying things by hand) and the courts have ruled against this argument.

This ABC article begins "Calling the federal agents surrounding his fortified compound 'guns for hire,' a New Hampshire man convicted of tax evasion vowed today that he and his wife would fight U.S. marshals to the death if they tried to capture them." This despite the later quotes by U.S. Marshal Stephen Monier "There is no standoff and the house is not surrounded. We have no intention of assaulting the house or engaging in a violent confrontation." and "We are not setting up roadblocks or surrounding the house."

And I'm so sure about "fortified compound". It's house and visitors have come and gone. What some describe as a turret, Brown describes as a deck. Here's another picture of the house taken in January. Federal agents had already seized the approximatly 30 guns Brown owns; a routine process after sentencing.

They have a web site, a blog and a myspace page. I won't support them by linking to them but they weren't hard to find. Yesterday's Boston Globe says Tax resisters finding allies in cyberspace. The blog gets a million hits a month. They also point out the wackiness: "He said Bush ordered the killing of thousands on Sept. 11 to justify a takeover of the Islamic world on behalf of Freemasons. He said his allies around the world are compiling a list of Freemasons for future reference."

Today's Boston Globe says Dukakis pardoned him in 1976 for a conviction of a 1960 assault with a deadly weapon in Somerville and "a dozen minor motor vehicle offenses dating from the 1960s and early 1970s." He served some prison time until a parole in 1965. Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge fame is with them since June 18th. That's sure to help calm things down.