UK Tax Crackdown to Target Middle Class

Middle-class professionals are to be targeted in a new crackdown on tax evasion promised by the chief prosecutor of England and Wales.

The Crown Prosecution Service will dramatically ramp up the number of tax evasion cases it takes on – with a view to prosecution – over the next two years, Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, told the Financial Times. The CPS will increase five fold the number of tax files it handles, to 1,500 a year by 2014-15.

This compares with 200 tax convictions the CPS secured in 2010 – its current conviction rate for tax cases stands at 86 percent.

Tax consultants who push dishonest avoidance schemes – and the professionals who invest in them – are central targets in the strategy.

"There have been some cases involving lawyers, some involving tax consultants, and plumbers," Mr Starmer said in an interview. "Within the ramped-up volume, it's intended that we will select cases to send a clear message as to the breadth of our coverage." Read more >>

Buy Health Insurance or Go To Jail

Image by sean dreilinger via Flickr

WSJ

Rhetorical Tax Evasion
The IRS says it will fine or jail you for not paying Obama's mandate levy.

President Obama's effort to deny that his mandate to buy insurance is a tax has taken another thumping, this time from fellow Democrats in the Senate Finance Committee.

Chairman Max Baucus's bill includes the so-called individual mandate, along with what he calls a $1,900 "excise tax" if you don't buy health insurance. (It had been as much as $3,800 but Democrats reduced the amount last week to minimize the political sticker shock.) And, lo, it turns out that if you don't pay that tax, the IRS could punish you with a $25,000 fine or up to a year in jail, or both.

Under questioning last week, Tom Barthold, the chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, admitted that the individual mandate would become a part of the Internal Revenue Code and that failing to comply "could be criminal, yes, if it were considered an attempt to defraud." Mr. Barthold noted in a follow-up letter that the willful failure to file would be a simple misdemeanor, punishable by the $25,000 fine or jail time under Section 7203.

So failure to pay the mandate would be enforced like tax evasion, but Mr. Obama still claims it isn't a tax. "You can't just make up that language and decide that that's called a tax increase," Mr. Obama insisted last week to ABC interviewer George Stephanopoulos. Accusing critics of dishonesty is becoming this President's default argument, but is Mr. Barthold also part of the plot?

In the 1994 health-care debate, the Congressional Budget Office called the individual mandate "an unprecedented form of federal action." This is because "The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States."

This coercion will be even more onerous today because everyone will be forced to buy insurance that the new taxes and regulations of ObamaCare will make far more expensive. Too bad Mr. Obama's rhetorical tax evasion can't be punished by the IRS.

DHS Summons Children to Serve as Citizen Police

Recent comments from a speech in New York by Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security:

For too long, we've treated the public as a liability to be protected rather than an asset in our nation's collective security. This approach, unfortunately, has allowed confusion, anxiety and fear to linger. You are the ones who know when something is not right in your communities. There's actually an important role we can play in educating even our very young about watching for, and knowing what to do, if you're in an airport and you see a package left with no one around.

This is fear mongering, plain and simple. When the government begins a vocal recruitment of its children as citizen police, you know fascism has arrived.