He went to jail for not paying his taxes, plain and simple, which is what brazil was referring to:
That is false. You CAN go to jail for not paying your income taxes. Al Capone went to jail for not paying his income taxes.
Capone was indicted for failing to make returns on his income, not for “simple non-payment.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,846873,00.html
So why do you keep trying to equate nonpayment of taxes - a statutory, i.e. criminal offense - with not paying credit card bills?
What’s the difference? Define “simple non-payment”.
Simple non-payment means that you file an honest and complete tax return as required by law, you do not conceal any income or assets, but you don’t pay the taxes you owe.
I’m not exactly “equating” them, I mentioned credit cards to answer a point that was made.
Yes or no: Most people will pay their bills even without any threat of criminal prosecution.
The IRS wants money not prisoners. So they will try all other avenues to get their money first before they use imprisonment. But that doesn’t mean it’s not on the table. It’s just that they usually find arrest and imprisonment are more effective as a threat than an actual act. Most people will see the Federal Marshal coming at them with the handcuffs and suddenly realize that maybe that guy on the internet was wrong and offer to pay. But if you’re real determined and call their “bluff” they will arrest you and imprison you, figuring that if nothing else you’ll serve as a useful warning to others.
How is that situation ever going to come up? If you disclose all your assets to the government, they will simply seize what you owe them. If you hide your assets from the government, then, according to what you’re saying, that’s not “simple non payment”. So this alleged “simple non payment” seems like a fictional idea. How would it ever occur in real life?
I would imagine that most common situation is when the taxpayer spends his or her money on other things and either has no assets or doesn’t want to liquidate or encumber the assets that he or she does have.
It’s when you have no assets to seize or hide, that this occurs. Or, a few dudes are deluded and insist the IRS has no authority.
But you’re right- most dudes try to conceal their income and their assests, which is what can land them in jail.
DrDeth, if nothing else could you please limit the use of “dudes”. It makes me feel like I’m debating constitutional issues with Crush the Turtle.
So you’re describing a situation where a person has no assets, but apparently had income (or else they wouldn’t owe any taxes), but has somehow spent all the income and doesn’t have any money to pay the taxes?
BUT, the money would have ALREADY been taken out of their paycheck. And if they falsified their W-4 info to eliminate payroll deductions, then I’m sure you would say - Oh, well that’s a crime, so it’s not “simple non-payment”. Or if they got paid under the table, then they were evading taxes. You guys are in essence constructing a No True Scotsman argument to explain why it’s supposedly impossible to be jailed for not paying your taxes. There’s really no such thing as “simple non payment”. Or if there is, it would be an extreme rarity. In virtually every real case of someone not paying his taxes, you could find some thing they did that could be labeled as outside of this “simple non payment” definition.
And these so-called “tax protesters” ARE jailed. For example:
Even if you flat-out refuse to pay, they’re still going to charge you with “evasion” if they want to.
Wait, you’re supposedly defining what “simple non-payment” means, yet you can only imagine what it entails? That doesn’t sound right.
JesuzKrist, haven’t you ever heard of AMT? Dudes can easily have a bunch of Stock option, exercise or cash them in masterful peices of bad timing and end up owing tens of 100’s of dallars- and they don’t have the money to pay it, and they don’t have witholding.
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/hearings.asp?formmode=view&id=6039
"*They believed this until about 2001, when, in the parallel universe known as the alternative minimum tax, the government began seeking more than $100,000 in tax on income that the couple never received…They knew they were over their heads. So they hired a financial adviser and a lawyer, and the advice was unequivocal: Exercise the options as soon as possible, but hang onto the shares, because they would get tax advantages that way, and who knows how high they’d go, anyway?
It was a doubly terrible idea.
The Millers scheduled option exercises on their calendar, like haircuts. Each time an option became exercisable, they called the broker, had him sell just enough shares at the market price to cover the exercise cost, and saw their paper worth go higher and higher - mostly in VeriSign stock.Options’ value depends on the difference between their exercise price and a stock’s market price. Rita Miller was getting thousands of options with exercise prices of $4 and $6 a share, and VeriSign’s stock was heading toward $250.Under the regular tax code, for the kind of “incentive” stock options that she held, that value would not have been taxed until the VeriSign shares were sold. But under the wacky AMT rules, holding shares after the end of the calendar year triggered a large tax based on the difference between the exercise and market prices at the time of exercise.(Incentive options are different from the “nonqualified” options most employees get.) Arthur Miller says their tax lawyer had no clue about this. But VeriSign tried to educate employees, and sometime in early 2001, the couple realized they were going to have a very large tax bill. Problem was, they no longer had the wherewithal to pay.Like every other Internet stock, VeriSign was crashing and taking the Millers’ paper wealth with it. By March 2001 VeriSign had plunged back to $40, en route to $6, but the tax bills stayed stratospheric. The AMT system allowed people like the Millers to recoup excess stock-option liability by taking credits against tax owed in future years - but only up to $3,000 a year. The Millers couldn’t pay the whole AMT without selling their house or cashing their retirement annuities and incurring big penalties. And even if they had, she says, "we were going to be 97 and 99 when we got all our credits back, and I doubt I would have lived that long."Thus the ordeal began.“I know, personally, dozens of people who have lost their homes” over AMT stock-option taxes, says Tim Carlson, president of the Coalition for Tax Fairness, a lobbying group organized to seek relief for people like the Millers. There have been at least two suicides, a coalition spokesman says.
*
Note that these people owed the IRS more than a Hundred thousand dollars, that they could not and did not pay- and “criminal charges” were never mentioned. Leins, seizures, levies, yes. But not jail time.
Nor is there witholding on Self Employment, which is where many dudes go wrong.
Or capital gains, or “other income”. In fact of the two dozen plus types of income, there is witholding usually only on a couple. So, it can happen, and happen legally that you have filed honestly but can’t pay.
And, that tax protestor? First of all, that is not the IRS. It’s the South Carolina Department of Revenue. Next: "An Anderson County man who refused to file income tax returns and was labeled as a tax protester, was found guilty Monday evening of tax evasion and sentenced to one year in jail and a $10,000 fine, the maximum penalty under the law. " He didn’t file an honest return but refuse to pay, he refused to file.
So, there are many many people (see I didn’t say “dudes” 
) who honestly file, and honestly owe, and honestly can’t pay- and none of them go to jail.
I suppose it’s possible to get into a situation like this. People who own their own business withhold their own taxes. My understanding is that they’re supposed to, at least once every three months, figure out their estimated income and tax liability since their last payment and send the IRS a check. Then on April 15, they file their return and straighten out any discrepancies between their estimated and actual liability.
So I suppose a self-employed person could theoretically earn a substantial sum of money, spend it all, and then send the IRS a note essentially saying, “I earned $50,000 in the last quarter. I owe the government $15,000. But I spent it all so you get nothing. Ha ha ha.” Now according to some people here, the IRS would have no choice except to gnash their teeth and let you go. But I think that the IRS is not going to quit that easily. They will come to you and if you don’t pay - even if everything you wrote was true - they will arrest you and send you to prison.
No, they’re saying the IRS would take your house and everything you own and hound you for the rest of your life – but not send you to prison. I don’t have any clue if they’re right or wrong, but the IRS can certainly do a lot to make your life miserable without actually imprisoning you.
Is “inability to pay” a crime?
I’ve said all along that the IRS would prefer to collect rather than arrest. But they’re going beyond this and saying that if the IRS is unable to collect its money it has no option of arrest - even in cases where the debtor had the money and willfully spent all of it before the IRS could get to it. To which I say, yes, in cases like that “inability to pay” is a crime and will be treated as such. If for no other reason, in order to prevent other people from avoiding their taxes by spending all their money.
You asked how the situation could possibly come up. I said I imagine that’s the most common way that the situation comes up. I’m not 100% sure that it’s the most common way, but it’s definitely a way that can and does occur.
It doesn’t sound right only because you misstated what I said.
Not everyone has taxes taken out of their paycheck and not everyone is paid on a W-2.
I’m not saying that. The IRS does have the option of criminal prosecution, even for simple nonpayment. But that happens extremely rarely and is not necessary to collect taxes.
Who is saying that here?