Which has more power, the tax collectors or the courts? Consider:
Sometimes when the IRS loses in court, it announces that it isn’t going to follow the court’s decision. That may sound like the height of hubris. But since the IRS operates nationwide and most courts have limited jurisdiction, the IRS can choose to keep fighting elsewhere, even if the court decision is binding in one place.
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The quoted paragraph makes this sound a little worse than it is, possibly giving the impression that the IRS might go after the same person for the same thing in a second jurisdiction.
All the article really says, though, is that the IRS will continue to argue in support of certain legal theories it believes are correct, even though the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected those theories. It’s not remarkable that the IRS would do this in federal circuits other than the Ninth, the majority of which apparently have already embraced the IRS’s theory; it would be baffling (but welcome) if the IRS did otherwise. Of course we should be glad that the federal courts are decentralized to the extent that they are, even though this will sometimes result in some federal circuits having more oppressive case law than others.
It’s a little more notable that the IRS will continue to make the same argument it lost on even within the Ninth Circuit. Presumably it will try to have the recent decision overturned by an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court. That could be bad for liberty, of course, but neither this nor anything else in the article suggests — to me, at least — any unusual power in the IRS’s hands.
Very few tax disputes with the IRS ever make it to Federal District Courts for adjudication.
The real problem is that the IRS routinely operates beyond the courts and Constitution in most tax disputes with citizens.
While other bill-collectors have to go to normal judicial court and persuade a judge that you owe money, the IRS can simply issue its own assessment/penalty based on its own arbitrary calculations. The IRS gets to play judge, jury, prosecutor, and executioner in declaring that you owe tax money. No separate judge, no jury, no law suit, no court judgment, and no 5th Amendment rights.
Once the IRS has decided that a taxpayer owes them money, if that assessed-debt is not paid promptly, the IRS can then go ahead to ruthlessly collect on that debt by seizing almost anything owned by that ‘debtor’; they even have their own police force to do it.
The 5th Amendment guarantees that citizens can not be deprived of life or property without legal (judicial) due process — that is, a formal court process/order.
However, the IRS normally ignores the 5th via the IRS’s own “Collection Due Process” (CDP) hearings … which are phony pseudo-judicial
administrative events completely controlled by the IRS. These ‘hearings’ have zero Constitutional authority to conduct due-process ajudication– but do so every day in most tax disputes.
Of course, if a citizen or business has huge amounts of money & time to fight IRS actions… he can take the case to Federal District or Federal Tax courts, after the CDP circus. Few can afford to do so. And with normal Federal courts — one must pay the disputed IRS assessment in FULL beforehand… and hope to win it back in expensive litigation that may take years; the IRS has unlimited time/money , and they don’t lose many cases.
The IRS is most powerful bill-collector on the planet — with very “unusual” power…certainly beyond the U.S. Constitution.
To be clear, I agree that the IRS has outrageous powers that courts should (but won’t ever) declare unconstitutional.
It will take someone with nothing to lose to sue them rather than defend in order to see any constitutionality brought back.
or fly a plane into their building?
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